Season

Spring Vegetable Pizza

April 28, 2012February 2, 2017

A couple of weeks ago, Jonah made us the loveliest picnic. We have a beautiful park a few blocks from our house, and on one of the first nice days, he decided to make us a picnic and we’d take it down to the park that looks over the river and the west hills of Portland to watch the sun set. I scored a good one, huh? So, really, he made this spring veggie pizza, but I’m going to post it because he’s already way behind on his posts. Jonah is a big fan of Martha, so of course he found this pizza on her website. We bought the pizza dough at our local grocery store, and he adapted a bit in terms of cheese (the recipe called for gruyere, but he used fontina…we think).

Spring Vegetable Pizza

Ingredients

1 jar (12 ounces) marinated artichoke hearts, drained (reserve the marinade!), hearts quartered if whole
1 bunch asparagus (1 pound), trimmed, cut into 2-inch pieces, and halved lengthwise if thick
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes, halved
1 pound pizza dough, thawed if frozen and divided in half
salt and pepper
7 ounces Fontina cheese, grated (3 cups)
7-10 slices of prosciutto (optional, but suggested)

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 500 degrees, and put the racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven. In a bowl, combine the artichoke hearts, asparagus, and tomatoes. Put one of the halves of the dough on a piece of parchment paper and brush it with the artichoke heart marinade. Now roll it out to about a 14-inch long oval, and transfer it (with the parchment underneath) to a rimmed baking sheet). Put half of the veggies on the rolled-out dough, leaving a border of about an inch. Brush the border again with the marinade and sprinkle the pizza with salt and pepper. Repeat to make another pizza. Bake them for 10 minutes, rotating the sheets halfway through. After baking for 10 minutes, sprinkle the cheese over the pizzas and bake until the crust is golden at the edges and the cheese is nice and melty, about 3-5 minutes. Cut into pieces and voila! Pizza!

If you want prosciutto (this makes a great vegetarian meal without it), tear it into smaller pieces and drape it over the pizza. It makes for a nice salty addition.

Mom’s Mac and Cheese

April 26, 2012February 2, 2017

Jonah here. Mom, I hope you’re reading this. Everyone else – let me give you a little background. This was one of my favorite foods as a kid, not the Kraft Mac and Cheese, but the kind my mom would make from this simple recipe. When I was growing up, we usually had it with broccoli, or a salad.

I asked my mom for this recipe when I went off to college, so she wrote it on an index card and I made it many times throughout my 4 years of school. That index card was magneted to my fridge and now lives in Annie’s recipe box in our kitchen. It’s really easy to make, but really delicious. Thanks Mom, for a childhood of yummy dinners!

Susan’s Mac and Cheese

Ingredients

1 lb. pasta – I use penne
2 Tb. butter
Half of a white or yellow onion, diced
2 Tb. all-purpose flour
1/2 t garlic powder, or more to taste
1/2 t salt
1 cup milk
1 cup grated cheddar cheese, packed in

Instructions

Fill a large pot with water, salt it, and bring it to a boil. Add penne and cook till it’s done; drain.

Meanwhile, melt the butter in a pan. Add the chopped onions and cook until browned and soft.

Add the flour, mix until smooth, then sprinkle in garlic powder and salt (if you don’t have garlic powder, feel free to mince up some garlic and add it with the onion at the beginning). Add milk and let it heat up, then add the cheese and mix in until fully melted.

Return the drained pasta to the pot. Pour in cheese sauce and mix in thoroughly. Serve!

World Peace Cookies (or Extremely Chocolate Cookies)

April 21, 2012February 2, 2017

One of my favorite care packages that I got in college was from my dad. It arrived the week before finals, and included all kinds of stuff to help get me through the very stressful time: chocolate covered coffee beans to help with the all nighters, delicious tea to help me fight off illness, dried fruit and other healthy snacks to keep me going during the long days, etc. It made me feel so much better about all the work I had to do, and made it feel like he was there, pushing me to get everything done and do the best I could.

Anyway, so I was thinking about my baby sister, who is about to enter finals week. And she’s had a bit of a rough semester, with some health issues (she may have to haver her tonsils out this summer, ouch) and all kinds of yuck-o stuff. And I thought, you know what would make her feel better? A care package full of funny and delicious things to help her get through the toughest part of the school year. Plus, let’s face it, I’ll take any excuse I can get to make cookies. I’d been eyeing this recipe from Smitten Kitchen for these chocolate cookies called “World Peace Cookies.” Apparently the title is based on the idea that if everyone in the world had these cookies, there would be peace. And they are pretty dang good.

World Peace Cookies

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 stick plus 3 Tbl unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup (packed) light brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 tsp fleur de sel or 1/4 tsp fine sea salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
5 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped into chips, or a generous 3/4 cup store-bought mini chocolate chips

Instructions

Sift the flour, cocoa and baking soda together into a bowl. Set aside. In an electric mixer with the paddle attachment, beat the butter on medium speed until soft and creamy. Add both the brown and granulated sugars, the salt, and the vanilla extract before beating for another couple of minutes.

Turn off the mixer. Pour in the flour/cocoa mixture and pulse the mixer at low speed about 5 times, a second or two each time. (A nice trick when pulsing flour and or cocoa: cover the bowl with a dishtowel, draped over the mixer, to protect yourself from inhaling the ingredients and to protect your kitchen from a total mess.) If, after a few pulses, there is still a lot of flour on the surface of the dough, pulse a couple of times more. After everything is all mixed in, continue mixing on a low speed for about 30 seconds more, just until the flour disappears into the dough. As with anything with lots of butter, you want to work the dough as little as possible. Don’t worry, the dough will be crumbly. Toss in the chocolate pieces and mix to incorporate.

Dump the dough out onto a work surface, gather it together and divide it in half. One half at a time, shape the dough into logs about an inch and a half in diameter. Wrap them in plastic wrap and stick them in the fridge for at least 3 hours. Towards the end of the three hours, you can preheat your oven to 325 degrees. Line your baking sheets with parchment, silpats, or just grease them lightly like I did.

Pull the logs out of the fridge, unwrap, and with a sharp knife, slice them into 1/2-inch thick rounds. They may crumble: don’t worry, just squeeze the bits back together. Put the rounds on a baking sheet, leaving about an inch in between them. Bake for about 12 minutes. They won’t look that done, but they are. I promise. Allow to cool on the sheet for at least a couple minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack. Good luck letting them cool all the way before munching on a few accompanied by a glass of cold milk. Yum.

Momofuku Noodle Bowl

April 20, 2012February 2, 2017

For those of you who saw the title of this post and went “What the hell is a Momofuku?” let me explain. Momofuku is a group of restaurants in New York owned by Chef David Chang. The group includes Momofuku Noodle Bar, Momofuku Ssam Bar, Milk Bar, and a few more. Anyway, I became mildly obsessed when I bought my dad the Momofuku cookbook for his birthday last year (he was obsessed after having eaten at one of the restaurants on a trip to NYC). Momofuku translates in Japanese as Lucky Peach, which is the name of a magazine that David Chang has recently published, all about cooking and eating. It includes articles by some other chef favorites like Anthony Bourdain, Wiley Dufresne, and Mario Batali.

Anyway! I found this recipe for a Momofuku noodle bowl on a blog called A Cozy Kitchen, which I’ve used before and I really enjoy. While the recipe is a little ingredient heavy, it’s really delicious, so although it may be a little extra work to get all this stuff (luckily Jonah and I already had the Asian ingredients), it’s worth it. We use stuff like soy sauce and rice wine vinegar all the time. They’re handy things to have around for a quick and easy meal (feeling lazy? marinate some chicken in soy sauce, mirin, garlic, and olive oil). We did fudge some things though, so I’m putting in the actual recipe and in parentheses what we did.

Momofuku Noodle Bowl

Ingredients

1 medium sized cucumber
¼+ tsp salt
½+ tsp sugar
2 ½ cups (or one bunch) thinly sliced scallions
½ cup (or just one large piece) minced ginger
¼ cup grapeseed oil (we used olive oil because we didn’t have grapeseed)
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp rice wine vinegar
1 Tbl olive oil
½ large head of cauliflower, cut into florets
1 lb noodles – ramen, soba, or lo mein (we used udon)

Instructions

Thinly slice the cucumber. In a bowl toss the cucumber with salt and sugar and let it sit for a few minutes and then taste one of the slices. Adjust the salt and sugar as necessary. I ended up probably using twice or even 3 times as much sugar and salt. Just because I wanted it. Thought it tasted better.

In a different bowl combine the scallions, ginger, 1/4 cup of olive oil, soy sauce and rice wine vinegar. Allow to sit and marinate for 30 minutes.

While those items are marinating, heat the Tbl of olive oil in a pan and add the cauliflower. Cook them on high till they start to brown and get a bit crispy. While the cauliflower is cooking, you can boil water and cook your noodles according to the package. Once the noodles are cooked, toss them with the scallion/ginger sauce. Now, serve the noodles in a bowl, and top with the cauliflower and cucumbers.

Now, this is a vegetarian dish, but Jonah and I were hankering for some more protein, so we bought a chicken breast. Jonah cut it up into bite size pieces and cooked it with a bit of fish sauce, hoisin sauce, and soy sauce, and it was good. A delicious addition to the dish. Yum!