Month: September 2011

Ricotta-Topped Rigatoni with Tomato, Sausage, and Kale Sauce

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I have a new love: Jersey Farms Crushed Tomatoes.

I can eat them straight out of the can. Seriously. They just taste so rich and, well, tomatoey.

All of the tomatoes come from just 6 cooperative farms in New Jersey. Once picked, they are canned within 24 hours with no added water or preservatives, only a little salt. The crushed tomatoes are thick, but not too thick. They are perfect. Just perfect. You almost don’t need any seasoning at all. You practically don’t even need to cook them.

But if you do cook with them, whoa golly, are you in for a treat. These tomatoes make the best pizza sauce. The best anything, really.

Using some mild beef sausage from my CSA, I made a quick sauce with just garlic, olive oil, and some extra kale I had in the fridge. After rolling some al dente rigatoni in it for a couple of minutes, I topped everything with a sloppy spoonful of creamy, locally-made ricotta. A little drizzle of olive oil to add an extra bit of luster.

And I tell you, it was delicious.

Ingredients:

2 cloves of garlic, finely minced

1 tablespoon of olive oil

1 pound mild Italian beef sausage, casings removed

Red pepper flakes to taste

1 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes (preferably Jersey Farms Crushed Tomatoes)

2 cups of kale, chopped with the ribs removed

Salt and pepper

1 pound of rigatoni

Whole milk ricotta cheese

More olive oil for drizzling

How to prepare:

1. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large casserole, or Dutch oven. When the oil begins to shimmer, sauté the garlic in it until it is fragrant. The garlic should just begin to have a little bit of color, but not too much. Crumble the sausage into the oil, and cook it until it is evenly browned (be sure to break up larger pieces of sausage with the edge of your spoon as you cook). Add as many red pepper flakes as you like. Toss the red pepper flakes with the browned sausage for about a minute before adding the tomatoes.

2. Carefully pour in the crushed tomatoes. If the sauce seems too thick to you, you can add some water to thin it out a little bit. Stir everything together. Lower the heat, and let the sauce simmer for about 15-20 minutes before adding the kale.

3. In the meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to boil. When the water begins boiling, add the pasta and cook it until it is al dente.

4. Let the kale wilt in the sauce while the pasta cooks. Adjust the seasoning.

5. When the pasta is done, drain it well. You will add about a ladleful of sauce per 1/4 pound of pasta. Toss everything together, and then divide the pasta into warmed bowls.

6. Top each serving of pasta with a nice, fat dollop of ricotta cheese. Drizzle some olive oil on top of everything. Before eating, be sure to mix the ricotta into the pasta with your fork!

Pan-Seared New York Strip Steak with Butter and Soy Sauce

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Is there Tom Colicchio backlash? The Top Chef judge is everywhere these days, opening and closing Crafts across the country, and thoroughly saturating the New York market with ‘wichcraft sandwiches.

You kind of want to hate him, or in the very least wonder sneeringly if he is actually ever in a kitchen these days. In any case, Sifty, in his recent re-review for the New York Times, did re-bestow 3 stars on Craft . . . so does that mean it never lost them after over a decade of dining?

Possible backlash aside, I have to admit that I love Colicchio’s book Craft of Cooking: Notes and Recipes from a Restaurant Kitchen. The book is not for the faint of heart. He does not give you “easy” recipes. They are dead simple, but they are very precise and suffer a little bit from Thomas Keller Syndrome, meaning that to execute some of them you feel the pressure to raise and snuggle a piglet from birth, feeding it only milk proteins and ambrosia until it reaches market weight.

Many times, I go over the recipes and think about how I can do it faster.

Not better, but lazier.

I inevitably find, though, that Colicchio’s way is the best way.

One of my favorite ways to prepare steak is how they did it at Craftsteak: in a hot pan continually bathed in butter to finish.

I also love my friend Tomoko’s suggestion to add a hefty splash of soy sauce to the end. The soy and butter marry beautifully together, giving a lusciously heady hit of umami to an already rich grass-fed steak.

Colicchio gave away his steak technique in an Esquire magazine article a while back, so this is just to summarize:

You will need:

A cast-iron skillet

Steak, a nice thick cut

Salt and pepper

About a tablespoon of canola oil

About 3 tablespoons of butter

Good soy sauce

How to prepare: 

1. For all successful steaks, make sure your meat is about room temperature before cooking. Take it out of the fridge about an hour before you want to eat it.

2. Season the steak heavily with salt and pepper on both sides.

3. Heat the canola oil in the cast-iron skillet over high heat. When the oil is almost smoking, sear the meat on both sides until it is brown and crusty. Please note that the steak will be seared, but it will NOT be done.

This is important because . . .

4 . . . after you have seared both sides, reduce the heat to medium-low. Let the pan cool a bit before adding the butter (you don’t want the butter to sizzle and burn on contact). Using a spoon, continually baste the steak with butter, flipping it halfway through to ensure even cooking.

5. Continue basting until it is not quite at the level of doneness that you desire. Right before that point, add a good, hefty splash of soy sauce to the pan. Keep basting the steak in the butter and soy until it is done. Alternatively, I guess you could add the butter and soy at the same time.

Ideally, a medium-rare steak will have a internal temperature of about 135°, but you can also gauge the doneness by touching its surface.

You don’t actually need a thermometer to do this. Make a really tight fist. Now with your other hand poke the fleshy part of your fist between your index finger and your thumb. That bouncy hard resistance that you feel is what a super well-done steak would feel like if you poked it. Open your hand and make a super loose fist. Touch the same part. That’s what really, really rare feels like. Now, aim for somewhere in-between.

6. Let the steak rest for a few minutes before serving.

Black Bean Salad with Oven-Roasted Tomatoes, Corn, Almonds, and Lemon Zest

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This is another great recipe adapted from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Every Day. Swanson, whose blog 101 Cookbooks is an amazing source of ideas and inspiration, makes food that is healthy, wholesome, a little quirky, always delicious, and never preachy.

The great thing about her vegetarian recipes is how amenable they are to your tastes. You can substitute chicken for tofu, or add shrimp, or beef, or pork, and the dishes will still be great.

For this recipe, I added local corn and the farfalle. Since Hurricane Irene, our farmers need all the help we can give them. Though NYC was mostly spared, many of the farmers and growers who bring the literal fruits of their labor every week to us were not. Almost no farm was left untouched by the flooding.

Support local and please make a donation here.

Ingredients:

1 pint of Sun Gold tomatoes (cherry or grape tomatoes work too), halved

Salt and pepper

Granulated cane sugar

Olive oil

3/4 cup of raw almonds, halved width-wise

1 cup of corn kernels (about two ears)

2 15-ounce cans of black beans, rinsed and drained

1/3 pound of farfalle, prepared according to package directions

The grated zest of one lemon

The juice of one lemon

1/4 pound of French feta, crumbled

How to prepare:

1. Preheat your oven to 350°.

2. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. Spread the tomato halves over the sheet and sprinkle them liberally with salt and sugar. Drizzle the halves with olive oil. Toss everything together so that the tomatoes are evenly coated in the oil, salt, and sugar. Arrange the tomatoes cut-side up. Roast them until they have shrunken, and have begun to caramelize around their edges, about 45 minutes. Remove them from the oven, and when they are cool, scrape them into a large bowl along with all their caramelized juices.

3. Meanwhile, heat the almonds in a single layer in a large cast-iron skillet set over medium heat. Toss them around every couple of minutes until they are fragrant and toasty. Be sure to monitor the nuts closely; they can burn in a minute! When the almond halves are toasted, add them to the same large bowl as the tomatoes.

4. Wipe out the skillet and add about 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Heat the pan over medium-high heat until the oil begins to shimmer. Add the corn, and toss the kernels in the hot oil until they begin to brown. Add the corn to the same large bowl as the almonds and tomatoes.

5. Add the remaining ingredients to the bowl and drizzle everything with olive oil. Toss everything together well. Adjust the seasoning and serve.

High Point Farms CSA: Last Chance to Sign Up for the Fall

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Our Fall CSA is currently underway with one pick-up out of 6 down.

Shares are still available to you lucky ducks who are salivating at the thought of grass-fed beef, pastured pork, free-range chickens and eggs!

Sign up now and pick up your share at one of two locations in the city:

http://highpointfarms.net/nyc-area-csa.html

Shares have been pro-rated to reflect the remaining pick-ups!

Asparagus with Chorizo and Croutons

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Have you ever made something from memory, and then gone back to the original recipe to find that you mixed it all up?

That’s what happened here, but that is not to say that the results are not still delicious.

This is sort of one of Jacques Pépin’s Fast Food recipes. I’m sure that his is better, but the basic combination of chorizo, asparagus, and croutons is delicious — with or without the almonds.

I adore Jacques Pépin. If I had to pick anyone living or dead to have a meal with, it would be him. Famously frugal, I saw him once on PBS make adorable garnish mice out of basically garbage. He can do that and I would eat it because he’s Jacques Pépin. Unbelievably awesome.

The man is a walking legend.

Ingredients:

1/2 pound of chorizo, cut into 3/4-inch pieces

1/2 pound of asparagus, trimmed and cut into pieces

2 cups of day old bread, cubed

1/2 cup of Parmesan cheese, grated

Salt and pepper

Olive oil

How to prepare:

1. Place the cubes of bread in a large bowl. Drizzle them with olive oil, and season them with salt and pepper. Sprinkle them with the Parmesan and toss everything together again until the bread cubes are evenly coated.

2. Heat about 1 to 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large skillet set over medium-high heat until it begins to shimmer. Add the chorizo, the asparagus, and the bread to the skillet. Toss and stir everything together for about 5 to 6 minutes. You want the chorizo to brown, the bread to toast, and the asparagus to cook through.

Adjust the seasoning and serve immediately.

Penne al Pomodoro Crudo (Penne with Raw Tomato Sauce)

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Indian summer, that strange spike in temperature and humidity that occurs following the first frost. Okay, so maybe we haven’t had a first frost yet, but the weather in the Mid-Atlantic has been so screwy lately that it makes me feel like anything goes.

I just know that it has been pretty warm out, warm enough to make me still crave food that minimally requires use of my stove.

Pomodoro crudo is the simplest of sauces, and an excellent way to savor the very last of this season’s tomatoes. I used a big, fat heirloom tomato, the jolie-laide of summer fruit. A little gnarly, very misshapen, but incredibly full, flavorful, and delicious.

And it goes without saying that the better your core ingredients, the better the sauce will be.

Ingredients:

About 1 to 1 1/2 pounds of very good, very ripe tomatoes

1 clove of garlic, lightly crushed

About 2 tablespoons of excellent extra-virgin olive oil

Salt and pepper

Fresh basil

About 1/3 pound of dried penne

How to prepare:

1. Bring a large pot of water to boil.

2. Set up a large ice water bath.

3. When the water begins to boil, score an X on the bottom of each tomato. Drop the tomatoes gently into the boiling water and leave them in for about 20-30 seconds, depending on how big your tomatoes are. Remove them carefully from the boiling water, and slip them into the ice water bath. You should now be able to easily remove the skin of each tomato.

4. Once all the tomatoes are peeled, cut them in half and remove the seeds. Chop each tomato, and transfer everything to a medium-sized bowl. Season the tomatoes with salt and pepper to taste (you can salt liberally). Add the olive oil and the crushed clove of garlic. Stir everything together, and let the sauce sit covered and undisturbed on the counter for about 30 minutes.

5. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Add the penne and cook it until it is just slightly under-al dente. Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce. Toss everything together, and remove the garlic clove.

The pasta should begin to absorb some of the excess liquid in the sauce.

Hand-tear a handful of basil and add it to pasta. Toss again, and serve.

Maple-Bourbon Glazed Pork Tenderloin

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Another freely-adapted recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. It takes a page from Korean fried chicken in terms of using corn starch to create a crispy, crackly exterior that the maple-bourbon glaze can adhere to.

The pastured pork tenderloin was also a birthday gift from dear Tina at High Point Farms. It went wonderfully with Bob’s Cabernet Franc!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

More people should give meat for birthdays.

Ingredients:

1 pork tenderloin (about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 pounds)

3/4 cup dark maple syrup (Grade B)

1/4 cup brown sugar, packed

2 tablespoons of bourbon

A pinch of ground cinnamon

A pinch ground cloves

Cayenne pepper to taste

Salt

1/4 cup of cornstarch

Kosher salt

Ground black pepper

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Special equipment:

1 half-size sheet pan

1 wire rack to fit the sheet pan

1 leave-in meat thermometer

How to prepare:

1. Adjust the oven rack to the middle position, and heat the oven to 375°.

2. In a small bowl, combine the maple syrup, the bourbon, and the brown sugar together, stirring until you have an even slurry. Add the ground cinnamon, ground cloves, and cayenne pepper. Add a hefty pinch of salt. Set this aside to let the sugar dissolve a little bit.

Stir the cornstarch, salt, and black pepper together in another small bowl until well-combined. Feel free to increase or decrease the seasoning according to your personal taste. Transfer the cornstarch mixture to a rimmed baking sheet. Pat the tenderloin dry with paper towels, and then roll it in the cornstarch mixture until it is evenly coated on all sides.

Shake off the excess cornstarch mixture.

3. Heat the oil in a large cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat until it just begins to smoke. Reduce the heat to medium, and place the tenderloin in skillet. If the tenderloin is a little big for the pan, don’t worry; it will shrink a little bit while cooking. Brown the tenderloin well on all sides. Transfer it to a wire rack set in the rimmed baking sheet.

4. Pour off the excess fat from skillet, and return it to medium heat. Carefully add the sugar slurry to skillet. It might bubble a little violently depending on how hot your pan is, so take care to not stand too close. Scrape up the browned bits on the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Cook the sauce until it has reduced to about ½ a cup, about 2 minutes.

Brush the tenderloin with approximately 1 tablespoon of glaze. Roast it until a thermometer inserted in thickest part of tenderloin registers 130 degrees. Brush it with another tablespoon of glaze, and continue to roast it until the thickest part of tenderloin reaches 135 to 140 degrees, about 2 minutes more.

Remove the tenderloin from oven, and brush it with the remaining glaze. Let it rest, uncovered, for about 10 minutes.

5. Transfer the meat to a cutting board, and slice it into thick pieces. Serve.

Congratulations to London’s Pitt Cue Co.

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Congratulations to London’s Pitt Cue Co. crew on a wildly successful summer run! I hear that there are officially no more pigs in England because you smoked and sold them all!

Thank you for warmly welcoming a Yank into your ranks for your final weekend. It was a genuine pleasure to meet you all, and to be briefly be a part of the wonderful community that you have created.

And a special thanks to Jamie Berger, restauranteur extraordinaire, London mover-and-shaker, excellent host, and dear friend. I can’t tell you enough how proud I am of what you and Tom have accomplished, and how much I am looking forward to hearing about all the great things that await you in the future.

Good luck in KC!