Made with Trader Joe’s whole wheat pizza dough, a crap ton of mozzarella cheese, red onions, green peppers, tomatoes, and basil.
Note on the TJ’s dough: The package says to put the toppings on & bake for 10-12 minutes. I did this once and MAN O MAN WAS IT A FAILURE. What you do is roll it out and bake for ten minutes, THEN add the toppings, then for another 10-12, then hit the broiler on for 1:30 to brown things a bit. Finicky? Maybe. Worth it? Oh yes.
So here how to make a delicious, nutritious, and cheap meal in under 6 minutes.
Ingredients:
Pack of stir fry veggies (if fresh stir fry veggies aren’t available, I like green onions, garlic, red onions, red peppers, mung bean sprouts, broccolini, sugar snap peas/ or green beans, mini-corn is good to, basically any collection of veggies)
Pack of instant noodles
(looking for at least 1:1 ratio of veggies to noodles, we actually like around 1.5:1 veggies to noodles)
2 eggs
So… We’re all friends here, right? Good. Because I have a confession. I, me, Matthew Conrad Good, a man, willfully and knowingly subscribed to Rachael Ray’s magazine for a couple of years. I did. It is true.
I had used some of her 30 minute meals cookbooks, and liked them. I still think that, nevermind you crazy foodie gourmand hippies, they are pretty good. Having never seen the show, the cookbooks were a pretty good introduction into this thing called “making food and not wasting your entire life doing it.” And while I may have moved on to greener cookbook pastures by now, I can’t fault her for getting people to cook. It could be worse. She could be Sandra Dee.
So without fail, every month for two years I would get her magazine. And sandwiched in between articles on trendy-thrifty makeup tips and articles on how to throw the best theme dinner party *ever* were a couple of good recipes. Even to me, with all my progressive gender politics, it was a bit emasculating – not gonna lie.
But every now and then, there were a couple of wins in the food department. And I’ve never been one to let my manly pride get in the way of my stomach. Whatever that metaphor means. So, I present to you..
(from *cough* Everyday with Rachael Ray, March 2008 Issue)
1 lb. linguine pasta
3/4 lb. bacon, chopped
2 large onions, sliced thinly
2 large egg yolks
parmesan cheese, for sprinkling
So, here’s what you do:
Cook the linguine in boiling salted water until al denta;, reserve 1.5 cups of the cooking water (important). In a large deep skillet, cook the bacon over medium heat until crisp. Discard all but 3 T bacon fat, then add the onions to the skillet and cook over medium-high heat, stirring, until softened (that means kindof medium-low heat. Don’t burn the crap out of it.) Add the pasta cooking water and bring to a boil. Stir in the linguine and remove from heat. Stir in the egg yolks, one at a time (I whisked these up first and kindof tempered them in with the liquid first. You DON’T want them to scramble here, so be a bit careful). Add the bacon, season with pepper and springkle with parmesan. Okay, so I did a lot more than “sprinkle.” And I suggest you do the same.
That’s the original recipe – I pan-fried some Sole (fish) in butter and put that on top of the thing. It’s not much extra work, because you can be cooking the fish while you make the pasta, and it’s a nice touch. Six ingredients. It. Was. Awesome. Kristin will attest to this.
In fact, it was so great, I really don’t understand how it was that good. What I mean is that I don’t understand the physics of the dish. Look at the ingredients. Where does the creamy sauce come from? There’s no butter… No flour… The egg yolks? Maybe. But there are only two of them. Seems pretty odd to me. I do know that it was DELICIOUS.
Bottom Line: Easy, delicious. Not terrible for you. Next time, I’m going to make my own linguine, with white whole wheat flower. I’ll be sure to report back.
Kristin bakes stuff. She made Alton Brown’s angel food cake, which is, even to the sweets-challenged, incredibly good. Make some.
So I have recently been experimenting with some higher hydrated doughs. Normally the breads I make are somewhere around 60%-70% hydration. This mean there is 60% of water to flour. For example in a 500 gram loaf I would have 310 grams of flour and 185 grams of water. The texture of a 60% hydrated dough is nice, it is slightly sticky but easily comes off your hands and the bowl. It is easy to form into a dough and knead. It is slightly softer than the play-dough you played with as a kid. The crumb on this type of dough tends to be tight and uniform. Perfect with a pad of butter and good for sandwiches. The bread you see above is closer to 90% hydration. It was a sticky wet mess and ended up being this beautiful focaccia.
I used this recipe http://veganyumyum.com/2008/05/poolish-focaccia/ I added garlic from a garlic press, sliced tomatoes and sea salt to the top. It ended up being great and you would do yourself a favor by trying your hand at it. (I didn’t use the full cup of olive oil for the top, only about 1/3 of cup)
In highly hydrated dough you get more of that artisan look, with large bubbles and un-uniform crumbs. They are pretty bread and the textures tend to be soft and chewy. The downside is they are pain to handle. They don’t really form into dough and instead you have to try some other techniques to make them into bread. One technique that is used in this recipe is folding. Folding and waiting allows the gluten to develop on its own as the flour continues to absorb the water and it hydrates. The gentle folding allows it to continue to stretch like you do when you knead. Some people don’t like this method because you end up using a lot of bench flour and flour that doesn’t get entirely incorporated is noticed. Additionally, as you add more flour you reduce the hydration and there is no exact way of knowing what hydration you end up at with this method. I just found this method which I think is called a french fold and looks fantastic.
I am going to try this next. See if it works. Since my last post I also have made beautiful sourdough loafs. The secret to a great crust on sourdough, a spray bottle at the beginning and middle of the baking process. The more I make bread the more I realize this simple fact: flour+water+time+yeast=yum.
Bean broth?
I was reading this recipe for Drunken Beans from my favorite food porn radio show, The Splendid Table, and I got myself all confuserlated. It calls for four cups of cooked beans, in their broth. I guessed correctly that the broth means “liquid you cooked the things in, dummy,” but was confused by the absence of any sort of quantity. I guess whatever fills in the cracks of 4 cups of beans. But I wasn’t sure, so I did some Googling.
And came across this fascinating article about bean broths or bean stocks on a site called Culinate. The article takes the idea of a bean stock to a more elevated level, suggesting that perhaps you add in some carrots, onions, bay leaves, and the like to the beans while they cook, as if you were making a more conventional vegetarian stock.
This is a real win, guys. A twofer. While you’re making beans for a recipe, you can add a few more ingredients (with no extra work), and end up with more flavorful beans, and a delicious, useful, and unknown byproduct! Fantastic. Again, measure out the stuff into bags and freeze for later.
I’m going to have to start reading Culinate, I think…
In the words of Pepin, Happy Cooking.
Chicken Noodle Soup can be good eats, too. The secret is to embrace your Mennonite heritage. Even if you don’t have one.
What I mean is that the secret is in the stock – you have to make your own to really kick chick-soup up to eleven. Which, if you really think about it, is GREAT – because making your own stock is EASY and BASICALLY FREE.
Hokay, here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna get a gallon freezer bag, and you’re gonna put scraps in it from all the “mostly plants” and “real food” you’ve been eating. So you’re having a nice celery and PB snack? Stick the ends you trim off in the freezer bag. Use carrots for something? The tops that you would usually throw away go in the bag. I had some junk from a leek I used, scraps from some fennel I didn’t need, stalks from some parsley I choped up, junk like that. It’s a great way to get rid of slightly-wilted, not-so-awesome-anymore veggies/herbs. And meat bits. Don’t forget the MEAT BITS. Make something with a bone-in chicken breast, and then throw the bones and bits you don’t eat into the bag. Throw fat you trimmed off a roast IN THE BAG. If you’ve bought a whole chicken recently, it probably came with a neck and some organs (this is in fact a biological entity we’re talking about here. Don’t get grossed out on me). It goes in the freezer. In the bag. What’s that? You bought some shrimp and now you’ve got some shimpy shells and tails and stuff? You know what to do.
So basically, over a period of weeks or months, you just try to remember not to throw things out without thinking about stock first. After a little while, probably right around the time you start to need more stock, you should have a nice little collection of stuff in your bag. You put in in the biggest pot you have and add an onion (quartered). Add 5-10 whole peppercorns, and fill it up to the top with water. Don’t add salt. You can always add salt later, but it’s purdy hard to get rid of it once you’ve put it in. Bring it to a boil and then simmer for HOURS. Go play some Wii Fit or something. Check it every now and then, maybe give it a little stir. Add more water if you want. The idea here is that more time is better, up to a point. So whenever you decide you’re done, pour the stock into a bowl, through a strainer, and discard the veggie-meat junk. The liquid is what you want. After it cools a bid, measure it out and put 1 cup each in ziploc baggies, then freeze. If you want, you can also fill an ice cube tray with the stuff, for smaller quantities.
So now you have this STUFF – which is basically yummy-infused water. What do you do with it? Well, you make soup! Or you use it to make cous cous! Or… if you’re doing a big skillet full of yummy kind of thing it usually calls for liquid, so use stock! You can usually substitute stock pretty well for anything that calls for white wine without too many troubles. Which is handy if you don’t want to use or don’t have any wine in the house.
Anyway, stock has flavor. Store-bought stock doesn’t have quite as much, but fools you into thinking it has flavor by adding a lot of salt. Don’t be fooled. Make you own stock. It’s worth it, I swear.
I’d like to thank all the Presidents of the United States of America for giving me this day off, and allowing me to work on my hobbies. And I’d like to thank myself for this stupidity-inducingly-good portabello mushroom sandwich. Oh man it was great. I am calling it “The Trotsky Portabello,” because the electronics junk you see behind the IQ-loweringly-delicious food is a breadboarded version of a guitar pedal I’m building, the Trotsky Drive.
Tried my hand at focaccia for the first time. This is a bread I have been wanting to make for a long time. Tried it twice, the first one I didn’t let rise long enough but was tasty so did it again and this one was fantastic. Used this recipe with some slight changes (see below). Complimented it with some steak with simple salt and pepper on it. I tried it in an iron skillet and didn’t let the skillet get hot enough so didn’t have the crust I like on steaks but they were still good.
I added some salt to the dough itself. I mixed about a tablespoon of oil and a teaspoon of dried rosemary together to rhydrate the rosemary. If I was using fresh rosemary (fresh herbs are almost always preferred) I don’t think we would have used as much. And then of course sliced tomatoes really thin and cooked it for 10 minutes and then added the cheese and cooked it for 5 minutes before.
Here is a pic of my first attempt, see how thin it is.
All of the traditional recipes I have seen have required using a sponge, though it was called something else (starts with a p if anyone remembers it I would be happy to relearn it.) A sponge is when you mix some yeast, water, and flour before hand and let it sit out. All sourdough starts with a sponge and true sourdough doesn’t use any extra yeast afterward. Adding this flour and water together allows it to autolyse and form nice gluten strands and adding the yeast allows the yeast to ferment and grow giving bread that nice robust flavor. Since this focaccia didn’t use a sponge I feel like I am missing some of the complexity of the flavors, but then again it only took an hour to make. I am going to try using a sponge next time and let you know how it turns out.
Other comments: This dough is one of the wettest that I have ever worked with. It should be sticky which allows it to be light and airy and not too dense. Downside of it is that it gets messy and is a little harder to work with, but the end result is worth it.
