Since it’s been getting a little colder in the last few days as evidenced by the need to improvise new sartorial accessories:
Shef shows off the latest trend in proboscular thermal regulation
We’ve been using the oven a lot too cook, not only because we’ve been doing a lot of baking and slow roasting, but because it warms the apartment.
Last weekend Shef cooked this wonderful and simple lamb dish because she was inspired by a recipe she saw in the latest issue of Saveur Magazine. Basically it consists of a bunch of vegetables (green beans, onions, tomatoes, garlic, leeks, eggplant, peppers – basically whatever vegetables you think will roast well) tossed with olive oil salt and pepper and laid out in a casserole dish or roasting pan. Onto the vegetables you lay lamb shoulder chops which have been seasoned with salt and pepper. Cover this with foil and cook at 350 for an hour. Uncover and let the lamb chops brown and roast for another 45 minutes to and hour. The end result: so good. The lamb juices seep down and flavor the vegetables so you have this rich, savory, mildly lamby, broth. We ate it over couscous.
inspired by Saveur
hmm, do I eat the magazine or the real thing?
And then a couple nights ago. I decided to make pizza using the sourdough recipe which I wrote about a few months ago. But this time, my starter was a bit flat. So, after the first 18 hours I added commercial baker’s yeast (about half of one of those packets you can buy at the grocery store). I put the yeast in about 1/4 – 1/3 cup of warm water to which I had added some honey in order to feed the active yeast. After about five minutes the yeast was frothing up so I added the yeast and water and about half a cup more of bread flour to the existing dough and put it all in the mixer to incorporate. I let this dough proof for another few hours during which time it rose dramatically (thanks to the new yeast). And this was the result:
Pizza before the baking - loaded down with toppings
Pizza toppings: homemade tomato sauce, mozarella, olives, bell pepper, leaks, beet greens, squash, Italian sausage.
after about 15 minutes in the oven... ready to eat!
The verdict: Delicious! The dough was sour and tangy, bready and chewy. Success!
For dessert, I made a rustic pear and apple tart. I used pears because the pears we’ve been getting from our CSA have been uniformly bad. Well they taste okay, but they’re super hard and instead of ripening, certain parts just rot as if they’ve been bruised really badly. So I salvage the pears that I could, added in some apples (also from our CSA and actually pretty good), cut everything up and tossed it with sugar and cinnamon and corn starch (at three teaspoons I think used a bit too much as I was flashing back to the tasty but liquidy strawberry rubarb pie which I wrote about earlier this summer). Per PK’s suggesting I cooked the pear apple mix first in pan to cook out some of the liquid – again the corn starch more than took care of this. And then laid the mix onto a pie crust that I’d prepared earlier (1 1/2 cup of flour + 1 stick of butter cut in+ about 3-4 tbsp of ice water to bind), folded over the crust and popped it into the oven.
the rustic tart ready to go into the oven
Half an hour later…
Ready to eat! See? I cut into eat before I remembered to take the photo.
