My Heart Literally Yearned For This

That weird-looking little round green thing is a caper berry. If you think it looks cute here, you should see it stuck to a skewer sticking out of a Bloody Mary or two - freakin' ADORABLE!

I read a funny Facebook meme last week, someone was figuratively going to start killing people for over-misusing the word literally. Hopefully they will read the whole post before throwing their little hissy fit at my title, though it's kinda fun to imagine somebody sitting at their computer throwing grammar hissy fits. Hehehe.  Must be nice to have problems like that. There, They're, their, honey! Go outside, eat an apple, and breathe - life's too short already.

So, over the past week, I have been perfecting a recipe for a party dip. It's a very, very good dip. So good, in fact, that in having a very small group of people test it, I'm also having them sign nondisclosure agreements because it is a super frozen product, and I've been combing through the US Patent Office website to see what my options are, and I need to get the ball rolling as I only have a year once it becomes public knowledge.

The downside to recipe development is the tasting. Most people would think that's the upside, but it's not - you taste dozens of "Not quite right" until you get the DING! And sometimes it's a texture thing, not a flavor thing, that keeps you tinkering with the recipe. Sometimes it's a food chemistry thing - this happens frequently in commercial recipe development - the recipe works great in a small batch, but once you start scaling it up (Making, say, 20 dips instead of 1 - which would still be a tiny little batch compared to commercial production), the ratios of ingredients don't hold stand up to  produce the same consistent product. My dip, needless to say, has cheese in it... imagine eating cheese for 4 hours each day for a week. Yeah. I hit the point where the dip was coming out my ears by Sunday. At this point, I might never walk past a wheel of brie without flipping it the bird again.

It's not like I'm thin to begin with, and it's not like about half my booty hasn't been made out of Bearnaise Sauce for the last 15 years... but, seriously, I got to the point where I looked at Brent and somewhat fearfully confessed, "I know you are LOVING this project I'm working on, but if I don't eat a bucket of some kind of green vegetable matter soon, my heart is going to come exploding out of my chest like the monster in Alien!" He laughed. Oh, suuuure... he's under 30 and still immortal. I remember those days. Bastard. He would eat nothing but sides of beef wrapped in bacon for two meals a day if I let him get away with it; three, if I gave him a vat of Deitz & Watson Smoky Horseradish sauce for dipping it in.

Hence, my lunch today was, by design, on the Lighter Side. Not just in terms of calories and good monounsaturated fat, but I craved lemon, and vinegar, and the crunch of blanched asparagus. Craved a nice healthy salad. Craved something vegetarian.

But I'm swamped,  and only had about 15 minutes to make my own lunch today, because I'm running around like a crazy woman, making up samples, printing out nondisclosure forms,  writing blog posts about the rambling dustbunnies in my brain, and letting them come out to hop around for you , dear reader.... Are they fricasseeing dustbunnies, do you think?



Seriously, be glad you don't live with me. My twisted mind goes off on tangents like this all day long.


So here's what I threw together. Honest to Blog, it took longer to wait for the water to boil before hand while I did other things, and take the pictures afterwards, than it did to make this salad:

Asparagus Cannellini Bean Salad with Lemon Pesto Vinaigrette
Serves 2

Ingredients

1 bunch fresh Asparagus snapped, woody stems discarded
1 19 oz. can Cannellini beans (also called white kidney beans) (I used Progresso)

For the dressing:

Pesto Sauce - 1 heaping tsp. (I used Buitoni, pre-made "light" pesto. Really.)
White wine vinegar - 1 Tbsp.
Extra Virgin Olive Oil - about 3 Tbsp.
Zest of 1 lemon
Lemon juice - 1/2 lemon
Salt & Pepper to taste

Start by putting a big pot of water on to boil, unsalted, and while that is heating up, wash and snap the asparagus, throw way the woody stems. Set up one large bowl of ice cubes and water for refreshing the asparagus after you blanch it. Using a colander, rinse the beans thoroughly under cold running water.

In a medium-sized bowl (big enough that you will be able to toss the asparagus and beans in once they are ready) make the Lemon Pesto Vinaigrette by first putting the pesto in the bottom of the bowl, and then, using the tines of a fork (or you could dirty a wire whisk if you wanted - I didn't) beat in the vinegar and then, very slowly, drizzle in the olive oil as you are beating to get a nice fluffy emulsion.

Toss the beans gently into the dressing so they have a little extra time to absorb the dressing, and season with a little salt and pepper - you can adjust more later. Cut a few thin peels off the lemon for zest, then halve it to squeeze in a few minutes. By now the water is boiling, so throw in all the asparagus, and count slowly 30-35 seconds (I go by color - brightest green wins). Using tongs, remove the asparagus from the boiling water and plunge into the ice bath, and leave there for a few minutes to chill fully. While it is chilling, cut away any pith from the underside of the lemon peel and finely slice or mince the zest ( I did a little of both - mixed the minced into the salad, used the sliced zest to garnish). Once the asparagus are nice and cold, move them to paper towels to gently dry, (you don't want them to water down your nice handmade dressing, right?) then place them in the bowl with the beans and dressing. Give everything a good toss to coat the asparagus with the dressing, then squeeze the lemon half over all of the salad, and adjust the salt & pepper, and divide onto two plate, arranging as you like. Garnish with extra lemon zest.

And yes, now that I've told you all of that, let's get a certain fine point of cooking out of the way, since this is only, like, my 5th post here on the Hot Mama Tarditi's Gourmet-To-Go-Go Blog: never, never hesitate to use a good-quality pre-made product when it suits the purpose of the recipe, especially when it's just for your own self to enjoy. If I was making this for a client? I'd use fresh. For entertaining, if we had a party? Fresh. But just me when I'm hungry (or my kid's school lunches?) - whatever's on hand that we need to use up around here before it would get thrown away works fine for us.

I'm not that kind of snotty, foo-foo, nose-in-the-air chef. Can't stand 'em.

I'm talking about the pesto sauce I used today. Of course I can make my own pesto sauce. And, at the end of the summer, when the farmers are begging for people to haul it away by the Hefty bagful, I will make my own pesto sauce! Gallons of it. From scratch. Using the really good olive oil and pine nuts and Parmesan. And I will freeze it and enjoy it all winter until it runs out - on burgers, on pasta, swirled into soup, spread on bread - until we run out of homemade again. When you use it as a condiment, you go through a lot of pesto, and you keep it on hand as par stock. At least we do. Our favorite homemade cheeseburgers around here are made from buffalo meat patties, topped with pesto, fresh mozzarella, and tomatoes. The point being, having something like that on hand makes a "gourmet" lunch yours in less time than it would take to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so don't get overly hung up and stressed out on the whole "must be made from scratch" mindset; the point is to just enjoy Great Food.

And not have your heart literally explode out of your chest. Like in Alien.

You Can't Go Wrong With Bourbon

Hello all! The Kentucky Derby is upon us this weekend, and many people are going to parties for the occasion. One of them happens to be my cousin Barbara, who asked me this week for a really easy recipe for dessert.

Now, let me just say, there IS such a thing as the classic Kentucky Derby Pie. And it's completely scrumptious. Think of a chocolate chip cookie, made into pie form, and that's pretty much what it tastes like. Some variations use more chocolate, some are almost a modified pecan pie, some have bourbon and some have walnuts... but really, when it comes to pie, and especially one made with those particular ingredients, is there any WRONG way to do it? No. No there is not. Pie is it's own virtue. Happiness, on a plate.

But when you want to make a dessert for 25 people at a party, Kentucky Derby Pie is not the way to go if you want "Easy". First of all, getting six slices per pie, you'd need to make 6 pies... and unless you're someone like me who's used to bulk cooking, that's a bit much for anyone.

Now let me tell you all a dirty little secret of mine: I like eating desserts, but I'm not overly fond of making them. When it comes to creating food, I think in flavors, and taste recipes in my mind as I'm making them up. So, when I have to think about sweet-sweet-sweet, I can't do it for very long, or I find myself looking for the nearest bag of pretzels, extra salt, please. One of my pet peeves is that desserts are becoming over-sugary as Americans are getting so addicted to no-calorie or low-calorie sweetened products that our collective palates are demanding a bigger sugar hit from foods that normally you don't think of having any sugar in them (breads are a classic example - have you tasted the soft pretzels at Wawa these days? Like a salted doughy sweet roll. Poor Maria Nacchio is turning over in her grave.). So what happens to the real sweets when your supposed-to-be-savories all have a higher sugar content and your palate is desensitized? Exactly. Oversweetened. And then you get companies who've already identified customers like me as a market segment, and have come up with an even more intense work-around to try to keep me coming back: the salted caramel trend. Salty and sweet at the same time... it lights up more of the "yum" braincells all at once. Where one was a sparkle, that, my friends is the whole fireworks grand finale over Cinderella's Castle, at least when you are a supertaster.

So back to my cousin's dessert: I suggested, first, a bourbon sauce. It is the Kentucky Derby, after all. It's tradition! Drinking bathtubs full of bourbon in the middle of the Bible Belt is one of those things that makes America great, and gives me hope for our future! And, now that I've told you all about lighting up those fireworks, you'll see why I gave my cousin this recipe, with salted butter:

Dessert Bourbon Sauce

2 pounds of butter (salted is fine)
1 pound of dark brown sugar
1/2 - 1 cup of bourbon (depending on how boozy you like)
1 cup heavy cream

Put the butter and sugar into the pan, over medium-high heat and stirring constantly, wait for it all to melt together enough that the sugar is fully melted - no longer "grainy" - you can hear it against the back of the spoon and feel it in the texture. Once that happens, turn off the stove, slide the pan to a cool burner, and carefully stir in the bourbon... the reason I say carefully is because alcohol and high heat can flame (though it takes more than this... usually to make it flame for Bananas Foster, I have to get a full boil going and then light it). Once the bourbon is stirred in, return the pan to the hot burner, turn the heat back on again, and stir in the cream. Bring the whole thing a a boil (about 3 minutes) and then take it off and put it in a glass bowl. You can make this in advance, keep it in the fridge, then when you are ready to serve, just microwave it until it's warm - about 3 minutes, stirring at each minute to make it heat evenly.

She's going to get the salty-sweet-fatty hits on this sauce, and everyone is going to love it. And, if that is all Barbara wants to do? Serve this with some brownies or chocolate chip cookies, and she's done. If it wasn't still so damned cold around here, STILL!, I'd tell her to fold it into softened vanilla ice cream and slap it between soft-baked chocolate chip cookies for a grownup ice cream sandwich.

However, if that's not quite enough, and my cousin feels like getting more creative, but easy creative, I suggested pairing the sauce with This Bread Pudding. I love Allrecipes website. I especially love their 5-star rating system, and the fact that all the ratings get averaged by real users... when you get a recipe that has 4 1/2 stars from over 1,800 people? You know that recipe rocks. I use them a lot for research... like for this recipe for my cousin, I suggested to take that basic recipe, but then substitute a more appealing dried fruit for the raisins - like cherries or dried cranberries, which would give a more interesting flavor and color to her results. And that it was entirely fine to choose a different bread, or mix half wheat/multigrain and half white. I've even tasted a sweet bread pudding made from RYE bread before - and it worked! I couldn't believe how great it turned out when they brought it to me... the two girls I used to work with were superb cooks. Great palates. It was always a pleasure tasting their food.

I had a Chef back in culinary school who taught the class on how to design a restaurant, front and back of the house, seating flow, kitchen equipment. God I hated that class! Not because of the  subject matter, - that was very interesting -  but because the Chef made us do the project in teams. He came from the Fortune 500 side of the food industry, was really into the whole corporate mentality of MBA buzzwords this and Six Sigma that, and his personal favorite of these was synergy. That guy had A Thing for the word synergy to the point of fetishism, no lie, and was always jonesing to see it in action. He had the insane idea that this coveted synergy would happen only by giving us a massive project, with an impossible deadline, and then assigning groups so that each was a mix of the top students with the about-to-flunkouts. And when you have a running 3.97 GPA and have spent 5 semesters on the Dean's List, watching more than 60% of the people in your program drop out, the thought of a slacker-group-induced-C is enough to make you contemplate murder. The group I was in wasn't too terrible, truth be told. (Luckily for me, the Chef also had a huge crush on one of the students - they lived together for a time - and had set it up so his little F-boy was at least guaranteed a B for his miserable page worth of work, while the rest of us frantically pulled all-nighters.) However, our group, much to his personal annoyance, did not have synergy.

Why am I mentioning this? Because Bread Pudding does have synergy. If any food can be said to be greater than the sum of it's parts, Bread Pudding is the embodiment of synergy: stale bread, eggs, cream, butter, and some kind of flavoring ingredients, and POOF! Warm, velvety awesomeness that you can take in any direction and have a dish worthy of setting before Royalty. Bread Pudding dates back thousands of years - versions of it were made in ancient Rome, Egypt, the Middle East and India. It's like soup that way - across cultures and centuries people love Bread Pudding.

One time I even poisoned my ex-husband with it. But that's another story.

Have a great day, all!

Potato Leek Soup

The picture doesn't do them justice... these leeks are so fresh they're practically talking smack to me! Though no "Yo Mama" jokes - since I'm their Mama. (That was terrible. Good thing I cook better than Tina Fey,  I'm never going to put her out of a job writing comedy.) This is about half of what we bought. I'm making two big batches of Potato Leek Soup. One for the TQS Parents Association's Special Friends Day luncheon tomorrow, and one just for my family, because they will stage a Kitchen coup d'etat if I dare feed others their favorite soup and neglect their own hungry mouths.

Look at them again, all trimmed up, after their 2nd washing: Aaaah, Food Pr()n! That's the money-shot, baby!

And again, finally a picture taken from INSIDE the Kitchen because it's breezy today and once they're chopped I didn't want a front lawn covered in Leek Confetti... which would totally happen to me. I am way too much of a klutz to go traipsing around tempting the gods to make my knee go just at that perfect leek-hurling moment.

You know why Potato Leek Soup is the most rocking soup for Springtime, ever? Because if it's freezing out (2 days ago, 34 degrees!) this soup warms your whole body, it's creamy warm potato goodness is a perfect backdrop for sprinkling on bacon or cheddar cheese or even a pat of herb butter. But, if you get a day where the temperature spikes up to the high 70's with 80% humidity (6 days ago!) a quick chill makes this lovely soup into an elegant, refreshing Vichyssoise, to be topped with fresh snipped chives, or caviar, or diced smoked salmon. Hot or cold, it works.

And the recipe is so easy to play with, it's impossible to mess up: you can double any ingredient to your own tastes and still have a delicious result at the end, it is entirely up to you if you like your soup lower calorie, or creamier, or thickened with more potatoes.

Which brings me to... the potatoes.

Oh, I guess you would probably like the RECIPE, too, one of these days, now that I've tortured you with all these photographs of ingredients,... sigh. Very well...

Potato Leek Soup

Makes 1 Large Pot - about 12 Servings

5-6 Medium Russet potatoes, peeled, halved

3-4 Medium Red potatoes, scrubbed, skin-on, diced 1/4 - 1/2” (any waxy potato will do – love Yukon Golds)

3 bunches of leeks, green ends cut off and discarded, roots trimmed, halved, washed, then sliced into half-moons through the fiber (like chopping celery). 

2 boxes (32 oz total) organic chicken stock

2 sticks butter

1 quart heavy cream

1 cup milk

Method for Crockpot

Put the potatoes, leeks, stock and butter into the crockpot and cook on low for 8+ hours, or High for 4+ hours, depending on your own crockpot’s “personality” – you just want the big potato halves to be cooked fully until soft, not so long as they start to dissolve.

About a half hour to an hour before serving, once the Russets are soft, use a slotted spoon and (in batches) transfer them into the blender, only fill it halfway with the potatoes (Because you are pureeing a hot item, always leave 1/2 of the carafe unfilled – hot liquid expands and can explode out causing burns.) Fill in a couple cups of the leek stock for liquid to get the mixture moving, and add some of the heavy cream and milk. Again… leave at least 1/2 of the carafe unfilled. You only want to puree maybe 3 seconds, as little as possible, or the starch in the potatoes will turn into glue. Dump the puree back in the pot and do the next batch – and for this, I just keep using the cream and the milk as the liquid. Leave the diced Red potatoes out of this – they are for people to enjoy as chunks in the soup.

 Once all the Russets are pureed, and back in the pot, give it a good stir, pour in any cream and milk you haven’t used, taste, then adjust the salt & pepper.

If you want to turn this into Vichyssoise, peel ALL the potatoes back in step 1, puree all the soup, then pass it through a mesh sieve, then quickly chill it in a metal bowl set over another metal bowl of ice, stirring constantly. Put in bowls and garnish with caviar, smoked salmon, prosciutto, or chopped fresh chives (or your own favorite fresh herb), or whipped herb cream. Hot or cold, this stays good in the fridge for a week, possibly 10 days, but it’s never lasted that long at our house. Enjoy!

Here are some of my tricks I do to make the soup better:

• Start by pouring the stock in your pot, and then, as you peel and cut each of the Russet potatoes, drop them into the liquid. It will keep them from oxidizing (browning) as you work and make a more attractive soup later on. 
• Never allow any potato eyes or black spots into anything you cook. Yuck.
• Rinse the leeks in the colander again after they've been chopped, to make sure all of the sand is completely out. 
• One single pound of leeks yields about 6 cups of chopped leeks, so if chopping up 3 bunches looks like leeks are taking over your kitchen, and you kinda have to stuff them into fitting the crockpot? You did it right. If you really can't fit them, save the extra, saute them gently in butter, and spread it over crusty bread. You're welcome.
• Don't use the dark green part of the leeks, it turns the soup a dingy color
• I was warned by 2 plumbers to always put the potato peelings and fibrous vegetable trim (like leek leaves) in the trash or compost, NOT down the Garbage Disposal. The soup tastes much better when you don't have a $150 plumber bill after making it. Needless to say, I actually listened after the second time I was told.
• Don't add any Salt & Pepper until the very end, after you've added the heavy cream and pureed the potatoes - at different times of the year, the cream and potatoes are sweeter.
• Yes, I really DO use that much butter and heavy cream. That's why it tastes so good. But you could, if you wanted to, use the Fat Free Half-n-Half instead. And cut it back to one stick of butter. But margarine or oil just won't cut it for this soup and still get as good results:

The Butter was nestled, all snug in its bed, while visions of Vichyssoise danced in my head.

Can I just make an observation of the difference between cooking and writing? - it takes WAY longer to write about making Potato Leek Soup than simply MAKING it. Granted, the CrockPot is likely to disagree with me, and give me dirty looks for saying that, since its been on duty for about 3 hours now. But really, it took only about 25 minutes to peel the potatoes, chop the leeks, wash everything, and clean up. The pureeing will take maybe 5 minutes. This is a soup that anyone can make, at any skill level, and get a great result.

So, that being said, I just took a whole day to write one blog post. Yikes! I may have to limit my Foodie Blogging to once a week.

That being said, here is the Beautiful Soup:

Beautiful Soup so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen
Who for such dainties would not stoop?

Soup of the evening,
Beautiful Soup.
Soup of the evening,
Beautiful Soup.

Beautiful Soo-oup
Beautiful Soo-oup
Soup of the evening Beauuuuuuuuuuuutiful Soo-oup!
Beautiful Soup.

Beautiful Soup, Who cares for fish,
Game or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two
Pennyworth only of Beautiful Soup?

Beautiful Soo-oup
Beautiful Soo-oup
Soup of the evening Beauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful Soo-oup!


Beauuuuuuuuuuutiful Soup..... Oops, sorry, got carried away.

Hehehe, and don't tell me that won't be stuck in your head every single time you make this soup. Forever. People all over the world will be singing Alice in Wonderland's Beautiful Soup, and the whole world will be a much happier place if they do!

Here is my Beautiful Potato Leek Soup, all dressed up and ready for dinner tonight. I'm afraid that the sun was already dipping behind the Oak tree, so the light was shaded through the leaves.

And here is my last picture, for the night, and for this post. The soup being quick-chilled:

Soup of the Evening.....Beautiful Soup!