Dinner party for fourteen!

I haven't been cooking as much since the CSA ended. I'm planning to join again for next season, but I've definitely fallen back into my usual cereal-or-takeout dinner routine. Ugh.

But... I did cook an awesome five course dinner for a bunch of my friends last weekend! Fourteen of them, to be precise. I was planning on taking pictures so I could finally update this blog. Unfortunately, my camera wasn't fully charged, so after a couple of introductory pictures, it completely crapped out. Boo! But I still think the meal was worth writing about... and so, here it is!

"Sous chef" Jenny in the foreground and "chef de cuisine" me in the purple sweater, making the parsnip soup.

After a round of Dark and Stormys to start the evening off, Jenny and I got down to business and started making the first course: parsnip soup with a mushroom "mousse." The parsnip soup was out of control. I peeled, chopped and sauteed ten parsnips and a shallot in half a stick of butter until they started to caramelize, then added five cups of vegetable stock and a bit of sea salt and blended it all up with an immersion blender. Once it was nice and smooth, I whisked in another stick of butter and a cup of heavy cream. (I know, I know... saturated fat city, but we only served a quarter-cup portion to each person. The next time I make this soup for an actual meal, I'm definitely gonna cut down on the dairy fat. But for an amuse-bouche sized portion, it was delish.)

Zach approves of the heavy-cream loaded refrigerator.

The mushroom mousse was a total improvisation. I wanted to have something mushroom-y and creamy that would get all nice and melty on top of the warm soup, but all of the recipes I was finding called for gelatin and chilling and molding and I was just not feeling it. Instead, I sauteed a few handfuls of finely chopped oyster, shiitake and portobello mushrooms, mixed them with a bit of marscarpone and then added the mixture to about a cup of freshly whipped cream. It worked out beautifully - the fluffy, creamy mushroom mixture slowly melted into the soup and gave it just a touch of earthy flavor.

The second course was a salad and cheese course: baby arugula, tossed with olive oil and smoked sea salt, piled on top of sliced beets and sprinkled with pulverized pistachios. On the side: a crostini topped with truffled ricotta cheese - white truffle oil whisked into incredibly fresh ricotta - and topped with a drizzle of honey. Simple, easy, delicious. My guests thumb-wrestled for the extra crostini.

(Note: I'd never had truffled ricotta cheese - never even contemplated it, in fact - until visiting Woodwork BK a few weeks before this dinner party. Their truffled ricotta is spectacular, especially when accompanied by a jar of their pickled cherry tomatoes. It was so good that I flagged down the bartender and was like, "I am totally stealing this for my dinner party next week!" My crostini were dope, but their entire menu is doper than dope. If you live in New York City, get thee to Woodwork post-haste!)

The third course was probably the most labor-intensive, and thus the most impressive. It was developed as an homage to (or total rip-off of) Eleven Madison Park's incredible Knoll Crest farm egg dish. I'd started this course the night before, following the Momofuku cookbook's instructions for slow-poaching fourteen eggs in their shells. (Actually, I guess I technically started it on Wednesday morning, when I woke up at an obscenely early hour to trek into Manhattan and purchase two dozen eggs at the Knoll Crest greenmarket booth. Their eggs are just incredible. Oh man, that runny orange yolk...)

I also wanted to add a foam component, as the parmesan foam on EMP's eggy masterpiece is a perfect example of how culinary foams can really make sense in the gestalt of a dish, rather than just be a superfluous and showy addition to it. I didn't really want to shell out the bucks for a whipped cream charger, though, so I figured my egg would have to go foam-less... until I found a recipe for a culinary foam stablized with lecithin and created with an immersion blender. Whoo hoo! One short trip to GNC later, I was making lecithin foam like a pro. Well, not exactly a pro. I'm sure that professionals don't show their pound of lecithin granules to everyone who enters their office for a week while screeching "LOOK AT ME, I'M GONNA MAKE FOAM!"

So anyway: course three was an assemblage of mushroom, asparagus and tarragon topped with a beautiful runny egg, two spears of asparagus, a parmesan foam and a parmesan tuile. It didn't even approach the level of unctuous perfection that Chef Daniel Humm plates at Eleven Madison, but it was pretty freakin good, nevertheless.

Fourth course was "peas and carrots" - penne pasta with a simple sauce of peas and shallots sauteed with butter and blended with cream and topped with strips of proscuitto, and a carrot and saffron risotto with a bit of marscapone topped with shrimp. Matt loved it so much, he proclaimed it "the best goddamn plate of food he'd ever had" and went back for seconds. Yeah, it was pretty good.

And for dessert? Tyler Florence's cracked chocolate earth cake, served with Ciao Bella's unbelievable blackberry-cabernet sorbet, served on a little bit of "chocolate dirt" - really, just a bunch of chocolate animal crackers crushed up in a Ziplock bag. A bunch of us took turns beating up the bag of animal crackers. Participatory dinner wins!

The whole dinner, in fact, was a lovely participatory event. Pulling off a dinner party for fourteen is no joke, and I couldn't have done it without everyone else's contributions. Dan brought extra chairs, Matt brought the table, Nicole was our bartender, Jenny and Danielle helped with all of the cooking and cleaning. (And there was plenty of dish washing, believe me.) Every single person who attended did something to help, and by the end of the evening, we were all drunk, happy and duly rewarded with a belly full of delicious food.

I can't wait for our next dinner party! But next time, I'm gonna charge the camera battery first.

Vegan Potato Leek Swiss Chard Soup!

This is going to be a picture-free post because, quite frankly, pictures of potato and leek soup are generally disgusting.

It's the end of October, and our CSA is winding down. No longer in the warm, heady days of summer, our farmer has been sending a lot of carrots, celery, potatoes and dark, leafy greens. This week we got a couple of leeks, too, so last night's recipe was pretty obvious: potato, leek and swiss chard soup.

Matt and Batya invited Nicole and me to their place for dinner last night. It was a lovely autumn meal on a beautiful, warm mid-autumn evening. We started out with Batya's zucchini fritters - crispy little pancakes full of feta and dill and dipped in a tzatsiki sauce - and some of the cheese Nicole brought back from Vermont - a soft, creamy and sharp horseradish cheddar and a firmer, milder sage cheddar. Yum!

Batya made a delicious salad out of this week's lettuce, apples, thinly sliced red onions and Annie's goddess dressing. Everyone raved about it - apples in salad are so good. They add just enough crunch and sweetness and... I don't know, awesomeness. Trust me, the salad was good times all around.

Second course was the soup. I'd looked at a bunch of recipes, but most of the traditional ones wouldn't work for one reason or another. Nicole and Batya are both vegetarians, and Nicole can't have too much dairy, so a traditional chicken-stock-and-milk recipe was not going to cut it. I found this recipe online and used it as a basic guideline to bring our soup to fruition.

The initial saute in the dutch oven combined a carrot, some celery, an onion and three cloves of garlic with some olive oil and a little bit of dried thyme. We let them brown a bit and get soft, then added three very small leeks, one very large mutant leek and about four cups of brown-skinned potatoes, scrubbed and peeled by the fabulous Sous Chef Matt Berman. A few more minutes of cooking passed, then we added five cups of water and five veggie bullion cubes, a bay leaf, some fresh thyme and a whole bunch of fresh dill and let it all bubble away for forty minutes or so while we drank some wine and chatted and played with Matt and Batya's six week old son. (Cutest baby ever, by the way!)

When everything was nice and soft and combined, we stuck the immersion blender into the pot and blended it all up into a delicious, veggie-full puree. The swiss chard was chopped into thin ribbons and added, along with salt and pepper, for a quick wilt into the soup. We served it up with slices of sourdough bread to good reviews all around! (I still think it could have used some butter and a splash or two of half and half... but that's just my love of dairy fat speaking. Even vegan, the soup was delicious!)

Dessert was cheesecake and chocolate covered strawberries, picked up by Batya in honor of Nicole's birthday. Aww! Happy birthday, Nicole!

I'm going to be out of town for the next couple of weeks, so this week's CSA delivery was one of the last for me. I'm gonna miss it over the winter, but I'm definitely looking forward to next year! I'll continue to update the blog with adventures in wintertime Greenmarket cooking... celeraic remoulade, anyone?

Quasi-drunk food photography. We've all been there.


CSA dinner tonight was at the other Nicole's place... we can do this first-grade style and call her Nicole M for purposes of this blog entry. Nicole M and her partner, Rhonda, live in a gorgeous brownstone in Prospect Heights that gives me the kind of real estate - and especially kitchen - envy that can only be dulled by three glasses of wine and a nosedive into the leftover pumpkin whoopie pies from One Girl Cookies. Nicole M is Nicole R's share partner, so for tonight's cooking endeavors, we decided to get our CSA sharing team together for a cookout on their deck! (We were short one Matt and Batya, but since they've got a three week old baby, their absence can be excused. This time.)


Damn, these two are amazing hosts. Look at that cheese plate! We sliced up CSA apples and pears to team up with the cheese. Those gorgeous, bright orange CSA carrots were used to scoop up some otherworldly tuna salad, and Rhonda grilled some halloumi cheese for our second cheese course.

Oh yeah. I said it. Second cheese course. If you're not jealous right now, you're just wrong.

But we were just getting started...


Dinner consisted of deliciously grilled chicken, again courtesy of Rhonda, who's a master at the grill. Seriously, she has a silver James Bond-esque case just for her implements of grilling. I think I have a new best friend.

Moving on... we cut up our assorted potatoes, wrapped them in foil with olive oil, rosemary and thyme and plopped them on the grill. The green beans were lightly cooked and combined with caramelized red onion, feta cheese, fresh dill from the garden and a lemon dijon dressing.


And those yummy cobs of corn were just thrown onto the grill in their husks. We rolled them in butter at the table, just in case there wasn't enough dairy fat in the meal. (Can there ever be enough dairy fat in a meal? I don't think so.) But on the off chance we were skimping on the cheese portion of the evening, there was a third cheese dish: this beautiful Caprese salad.


Aren't those little basil leaves the cutest? I just want to take them home and snuggle up with them. And then eat them.

By the time dessert rolled around - pumpkin and chocolate whoopie pies, assorted cupcakes and eensy weensy little palmiers from One Girl Cookies and a Trader Joe's apple pie - we were all too full to even contemplate eating more food, let alone taking pictures of it. We eventually made room for the eating part. Or at least I did.

There's always room for frosting.

Hey look, corn and slow-cooker barbecue chicken!

Last Thursday, Nicole and I weren't really sure what to expect in our CSA haul. Even though we're firmly into October, we've still been getting things - like corn and tomatoes - that I sort of associate with late summer, and so far, we haven't gotten any of the root vegetables that we're still dying to bake into warm, yummy gratins and casseroles. We also felt like a challenge. So we made Indian food!

Here are the veggies we started with... hello, beautifuls!

Neither of us had ever attempted something quite as intimidating as Indian food before, so I scoured the Internerd for appropriate recipes. We hit up Sahadi's for spices before heading to the CSA. Turmeric, cardamom pods, cumin... and some garam masala that exploded in my bag on the way home, giving my shiny new apple haul a light dusting of garam masala that may or may not accidentally infuse the applesauce I'm planning to make tomorrow.

The recipes seemed easy enough, so I got a little cocky and didn't really follow any particular recipe to the letter. I couldn't find a mixed vegetable curry recipe that felt right, so I just sort of made it up as I went along, following the basic proportions of onion, garlic, ginger paste and spices to mixed-up veggies. We had the most gorgeous orange and yellow carrots, some wax beans left over from last week, some strange flat green beans and a couple of Japanese eggplant. I tossed in a little extra chili powder to make it spicy, and stirred in some yogurt towards the end to make it creamy, and in the end, it was tasty - if a bit too spicy.

Since we'd already bought the spices, and since Jessica and I are both suckers for it, we also made chicken korma with the same basic ingredients, sliced almonds, some butter that I didn't bother to clarify, a can of coconut milk and some more yogurt. The korma was definitely underspiced, but... you know, whatevs. I tried!

Served over basmati rice, we wound up feeding five hungry Brooklynites - and stuffing a couple of sample bites into a sixth - with leftovers a-plenty. I'm definitely not opening up an Indian restaurant any time soon, but I think we were all pretty happy with the results!

Veggie curry on the left, chicken korma on the right

Extreme closeup! This is actually kind of gross. I have to stop
photographing food after three glasses of wine.

This Thursday, we're planning on a goodbye-warm-weather barbecue at Nicole 2's place. I'm hoping for some eggplant to throw on the grill... and maybe some turnips for that gratin, finally.

Cooking with Nicole, part deuce

Last week, Nicole's friend Courtney joined us as we tried to figure out what to do with the gigantic, two foot long summer squash that my friend Beth gave me. Besides whacking each other over the head with it, of course.



We eventually decided to make a stuffed squash. I found a recipe that involved portobello mushrooms, quinoa and ricotta cheese... but Trader Joe's was sold out of the latter two, and we wanted to add whatever we'd gotten in our CSA pickup, so we wound up just mixing together some couscous, some strange, chewy grains from TJ's, tomato, green pepper and onion from the CSA, portobello mushrooms and queso blanco from the bodega. (Oh, and an egg to bind everything together... and a bunch of red pepper flakes... and some other spices I found in Nicole's cabinet.)

It reminded me of the kind of hippie meals we used to have at the co-op in college. Veggie- and grain-centric, cheap and tasty. It was good, especially for something that we basically just made up as we went along.

Dinner with Monica this week started out with Nicole's warm Brie and hot pepper jelly on crackers - an indulgent appetizer before a lighter main course. We got beets and tons of apples this week, so Nicole and I decided to make an apple, orange and beet salad with toasted walnuts and a side of corn. I roasted the beets, sliced everything up and drizzled it with olive oil, balsamic, salt and pepper. Yum...


For dessert, the pendulum swung back to indulgent: warm, cinnamon-y apple crisp. I think I went a little too heavy on the brown sugar, so none of us could really clean our plates... but I think it'll be a good topping for some oatmeal later in the week.


I've still got last week's pears kicking around, so sometime this week, I'm going to follow Nicole's lead and make some pear-applesauce. (Her version was sooo good.)

Dinner at Matt and Batya's: five courses of CSA awesomeness. First up are homemade jalapeno poppers. Like a moron, I sliced the jalapenos with bare hands and promptly rubbed my lips. Whoa, homemade collagen injection! The rest of the meal was eaten through my newly puffy Olsen-twins-style lips.


We stuffed the CSA jalapenos with a mixture of cream cheese and super-sharp cheddar cheese, dipped them in egg wash, rolled them in breadcrumbs and fried 'em up.


Soup course next: Batya's spectacular vegetarian red pepper soup. I had absolutely nothing to do with this so I don't know the recipe, but I've definitely got to get it out of her ASAP. That evening, we ate it with a slice of sourdough bread, but she says she usually serves it with grilled Gruyere sandwiches, which sounds like heaven in a bowl.


Fresh corn, tomato and herb salad. Super simple, super fresh, super tasty.


Eggplant and caramelized onion pizza with mozzarella and pizza dough from Monty's. We cooked these on Matt and Batya's pizza stone.


And finally, Batya's famous chocolate chip blondies. I could eat these every day for the next five hundred years and still want more.

Now for some picture-less menu bragging! A few days ago, my friend Adam and I hosted a farmer's market-focused dinner for a few of our coworkers, to rave reviews all around. Adam suggested that we just go to the farmer's market on our lunch break, pick up whatever random stuff looked tasty and figure out what to make out of it. This is what we came up with:

Heirloom tomato, peach, pancetta and basil salad with bacon-balsamic viniagrette
Corn, wild mushroom and cilantro salad with seared scallops
Grilled eggplant and fresh mozzarella stacks with homemade pesto
Potato, onion and red pepper frittata with garlic aioli and chorizo
Apple upside down cake and fresh whipped cream

It wound up being a totally lovely meal, served slowly and in courses and with lots of wine and laughter and compliments to the chefs. Cooking for friends is so nice - we not only get to be creative with the menus and flex our culinary skillz for an audience, but we also get to enjoy a fancy-pants meal with our friends for a fraction of what it would cost in a restaurant. We can't wait to do it again! But next time, we'll be sure to take pictures.

The last few days of summer have been good to us. Our CSA share this week is full of corn; heirloom, non-heirloom and grape tomatoes; onions and potatoes and collard greens and lettuce. Even our fruit share is exciting - bunches of nectarines and plums have replaced the endless parade of undersized peaches. The bags of veggies have gotten so full, it's hard to haul them home!

It's been years since I've been in school, but Sunday nights are still kind of icky. I love my job, but I'm always a lot happier on Friday nights, with two whole glorious days of sleeping in, socializing and sloth lie ahead, than Sunday nights when you know the next day is gonna be full of alarm clocks, long commutes and to-do lists.

All the more reason, though, to have a lovely Sunday dinner. For this evening's fancy meal, I cooked the strip steak I'd ordered through the CSA's naturally-raised meat delivery service. It was a beautiful steak, unfortunately cooked by someone who really has no idea what to do with a nice piece of meat. Ten minutes, two smoke-detector alarms and three open windows later, what I thought was going to be a medium-rare steak was basically still moo-ing. So I sliced it up, tossed it back in the pan for a couple of seconds on each side, and wound up with a bunch of less-attractive - but perfectly pinky-red on the inside - slices of steak. On the side - buttery corn off the cob and a really simple salad of sliced tomato, parsley, salt and pepper.

Unfortunately, I forgot to charge my DSLR's battery this week, so I wasn't able to get a decent picture of dinner. I suck. Instead, please accept this picture of the delicious peach and plum crostada that I made for dessert:


And also, the picture of the sliced nectarine, butter and maple syrup on Trader Joe's whole-grain waffles that I had for Saturday breakfast:


(Those nectarines aren't fluorescent in real life... only in the flash of my point and shoot. Though I guess if I hadn't been too lazy to pull out the Nikon on Saturday morning, I would have realized the battery was dead long before Sunday dinner.)

Coming soon: a full accounting, with pictures, of last Thursday's CSA feast at Matt and Batya's! Homemade jalapeno poppers, whaaat?!