Coquillettes au Comté et Pousses d’Epinard or, in language I can understand, Elbow Macaroni with Comte Cheese and Baby Spinach. This is a dish that’s specifically written as an individual serving, although the recipe appealed to Lisa as well, so I ended up cooking a double portion. The end result needed a lot more cheese to reach excellence, but it was intriguing enough to merit another try, this time following the recipe exactly.
Popcorn, the Old Fashioned Way: Talk about return on investment! It costs less than microwave popcorn, requires only slightly more effort, and is amazingly good. I’ve only cooked it once so far, drizzling a few tablespoons of melted butter on top the result, and I have been craving it ever since. I briefly flirted with popcorn for dinner just so I could get another taste at it, but I’ll have to wait for another lazy movie weekend.
Ziti in a Gorgonzola Cream Sauce: This one came out of Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything, which has never let me down. Lisa and I were flipping throughthe cookbook, looking for a food project for the night, and we stumbled upon this dish, which is one of my favorite dishes in the world when I get Italian takeout down by my parents’ house. The end result was, again, promising, but a few missteps on my part led to a dish that was pretty good, but begged for another, better handled try.
Four Cheese Pasta: Some might call Cook’s Illustrated the Alton Brown of Food Journalism but Alton Brown is really the Cook’s Illustrated of Food TV (although Cook’s Illustrated produces the excellent America’s Test Kitchen on PBS, so I don’t know if he can even claim that). Just like Alton Brown, I partake in the entertainment portion and never cook the food. Lisa has made a couple recipes off America’s Test Kitchen with great success, but this Four Cheese Pasta was my first crack at it. This was, by far, the biggest success of all the dinner recipes I’ve tried. The four cheeses: Fontina, Gorgonzola, Pecorino Romano and Parmesan. After the pasta is boiled, you leave it slightly wet and pour it over the shredded/grated cheeses at the bottom of a large bowl, dump the accompanying heavy cream sauce on top of that and cover for five minutes. Of all the three cheese recipes I’ve made so far, this was bay far the best way of getting the most cheese-per-bite as the cheese is given proper time to melt. This one is a definite staple, although it’ll eventually make my heart explode.
The Farmer’s Market Brunch: sick of fast food and paying too much for crap, I decided it was time to make a good ol’ fashioned big breakfast this past Sunday. I got dressed and headed to Salinger’s Market by myself, leaving the sleepy missus to enjoy the lazy morning. I came home with: Thick Cut Bacon and Chorizo Sausages both smoked in a nearby smokehouse, a Dozen Apple Cider Donuts, a jug of Apple Cider, a small basket of pears, and a thing of pancake mix (I wasn’t energetic enough to make my own). We prepared everything together and it was far more rewarding and delicious than what we get from our usual trip to the bagel store. Even the pancake mix delivered some surprisingly good pancakes, topped with the best thing Alton Brown has ever recommended to me: Grade B Maple Syrup. I’ve kept away from maple syrup my entire life, finding the synthetic stuff in the grocery stores too sickeningly sweet. Grade B Maple Syrup makes me realize that I’ve been missing out on the true joy of syrup for far too long and that everyone else is slumming it with that Aunt Jemima crap.
Tonight I’m back to Dream Dinners, but I’ve got the cooking bug and it won’t be long before I try out my next recipe.