Brand A

In celebration of the Yes We Candidate’s swearing in today, I made an arugula focused dinner: whole wheat pasta with sausage and wilted arugula.

Simple, hearty, relatively inexpensive, and pretty lo-cal, which is becoming more relevant as 20 degree weather induces visions of Caribbean vacations and attendant bikinis. Despite all of the bold, basic flavors and textures in this dish, the wilted arugula and the time that you let it sit adds a layer of depth that makes it worth eating.

For 4-5 servings:

- 2 cloves of garlic, sliced
- 2 tbs oil
- 1 bag of whole wheat egg noodles, very al dente
- 1 tube of Gimme Lean! sausage
- 1 box of arugula
- 1 jar of Newman’s Own marinara
generous salt and pepper

Satuee the garlic, then brown the sausage (or snausage, which my girlfriend calls it to distinguish from the real stuff) until it’s a deep golden brown and is very firm. Season with salt. If you don’t cook it thoroughly enough, it wont’ make you sick but your leftovers will have the taste and texture of Play Doh.

Dump the sauce into the pan and turn the heat up a little until it’s bubbling. Keep the cover on it so it doesn’t explode all over your kitchen. Salt and pepper again. When it’s good and hot, also dump in your undercooked noodles. They’ll soften more in the sauce, so you don’t want to pre-cook them too much. Stir, turn the heat to low, then add in the arugula, and stir again. Put the cover on the pan and let it all hang out for about 8 minutes, with another stir or two to make sure it’s even.

Spoon the pasta into a big ol’ bowl and enjoy.

For Hanukkah a few years ago, my father bought me a book. “Low Fat Jewish Cooking.” I’m still pretty certain that this came from the Barnes and Noble humor section, which is where he has selected every Hanukkah. I’ve never felt a need to refer to it, as my primary Jewish cooking duties come once a year for a tradition my friends estabished when we all moved out to Astoria a few years ago: The Annual Feast of Fried Foods (FoFF).

Last year I made some wicked gingered apple sauce. This year, I was requested of to make kugel. I didn’t want to make the typical cheesecake-with-noodles version, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to slice 4 lbs of potatoes, even if my Cuisinart is my third-best friend (after my girlfriend and the Kitchenaid Artisan she gave me). I did some searching around Epicurious and came upon Browned Onion Kugels.

Noodly!

1. Double the recipe. Kugel is not supposed to be made in small amounts. You will always want more, and you can eat it for breakfast by itself for a week.

2. Substitute the onions with 4 large leeks, sliced thinly. I had 2-3 tbs of garlic butter in the fridge, which I used to sautee the leeks at very low heat for about 40 minutes until very translucent and about to caramelize. If you don’t have garlic butter, use about 3 tbs of oil and 3 cloves of diced garlic, and sautee that gently for about 5 minutes before adding the leeks. Season along the way with salt and pepper.

3. I traded out the cottage cheese for part-skim ricotta. Cuz I’m watching the calories. (Psht.)

4. I took the muffin pan option, and divided this up easily into 18 individual servings and a 1 quart Pyrex dish for my personal breakfasting.

Recommendations on what I’d do differently next time:

1. Up the volume of noodles by a few handfuls and cut back on the dairy by about 3/4 of a cup on the sour cream and ricotta. These came out eggy and fluffy, but might’ve been just a little better if they’d had more texture.

2. Don’t overfill, which is what I did. If you have another muffin pan, or if you want to bake in batches, do it.

3. Lube the top of your pan and put something in your oven to catch the drips. These guys will almost definitely overflow a little, leaving you with some unattractive burnt edges and a loud smoke detector.

It’s 9:17pm in Amy’s apartment….

Do I have anything sweet in the house?

No.

Shit.

Didn’t I just buy eggs this weekend?

Yes!

Impulse cookies!  Problem solved.

There is a reason I bough those air tight containers from Target.  Having butter, sugar, flour and eggs on hand will help you solve just about any culinary improv challenge.  And if you still can’t make real food with the help of these staples…at least you’ll have cookies.  With the mint extract that I accidentally bought last year and some cocoa powder donated from my roommate, I whipped up a batch of really delicious mint chocolate cookies.  I’ve made this recipe half a dozen times, and with the help of a mixer with more horse power than my Saturn, it’s 30 minutes to certain cookie satisfaction.

Of course, since I’m terrible about saving recipes to my “recipe box” or keeping notes on stuff I’ve made, I forgot my key adaptation to not the recipe, but the process.  You don’t need 2 hours to chill the dough to slice it into rounds, because it is already extremely firm and actually a bit dry.  I think it’s less onerous to roll out balls of dough and the squash them flat with the buttered bottom of a glass.  When I made these as part of a gift for my family, I did the butter-sugar-dip-squash maneuver which added a nice crackly sugar texture to the surface of the cookies.  I didn’t do any flattening this time, which is why I got these completely tasty but very poufy cookie nubbins.

I also blowed one up.  Some day, probably after Christmas, I fill get one of those silicone scraper paddles for my mixer to solve the Kitchen Aid’s problem of leaving hunks of unmixed butter clinging to the bowl.  That’s what I think happened to this poor little guy.  Iron Chef/Mythbusters judges still award 8 points for aroma.

On Saturday I hosted the Third Annual Dinner Party, a tradition I started when all of my friends moved to Astoria after college and I wanted a way for us to share our Thanksgiving-y dishes among the urban tribe.  We crammed about 25 people into my tiny apartment, and by midnight we were all stuffed and I was begging people to take some leftovers.  I thought I made out with the best parts: garlic butter, cranberry maple butter, acorn-sage strudel (all my concoctions, which I didn’t get to eat because I was too busy trying everyone else’s stuff) and two mostly-full bottles of Shiraz.  I’ve been sustaining myself off the leftovers and some additions this week, but I was ordered by my doctor on Tuesday to absolutely avoid alcohol for 3 weeks while my ulcer is healing up.  Coffee in moderation is ok, thank god.

Believe it or not, I tried to give the wine away but got no takers, so tonight I scoured my cookbooks and ended up, as always, on epicurious.com, which I swear up and down is the best way to find recipes when you don’t know what to do with what’s in your kitchen.  I found a recipe in which I had everything on hand from my pantry, the CSA, and my garden, plus a leek and three cans of broth from the store.  When I eat more of it tomorrow I’ll probably take pictures to add to this post, but tonight it was all about getting dinner done.

Lentil and Roasted Garlic Soup with Seared Steak (sans steak)

Like everything I make, this is an extremely flexible recipe that requires next to no planning or accuracy.  I tend to eliminate fussy prep steps, but the pan-roasted garlic with rosemary and the addition of sage to the leeks are really key to the depth and richness of the soup.  I made a few changes:  I used about 1 cup of black lentils instead of preparing the green and red lentils separately.  I had sweet potatoes instead of yams and brocolli rabe instead of kale.  I might leave out the potoates next time, but the bitterness of the rabe really worked here, especially because the greens go in wilted at the end instead of stewed through the whole process.  The most important change was the switch from 7 cups of stock to about 4 cups of stock and half a bottle of red wine and a little water.  I was afraid I’d made a horrible mistake when the stock, lentils and wine came to a boil and created a really….weird….kind of smell.  That dissappated, though, and the result was a magnificently rich, truly meaty flavor and color that was beautiful with the wilted greens.  Even for meat eaters, I would suggest forgetting the strip steak topping and buying yourself a nice bottle of red to split with the soup.

A big thank you goes out to all of my lazy-assed friends who didn’t take me up on my offer of free wine.  I doubt this recipe with convince anyone to take the rest, but that’s just fine with me.  I’ll just have another Leftovers and Lentils party.