Oven Baked Apple Slices - Master Recipe #9

I'm behind in my blogging. But I'm back. But something is wrong with the photo uploader, so I'll have to try it again later. When I first saw this recipe in the book, I thought I might wait until fall to make it when apples taste best. But the pragmatist in me took over, as I had extra apples and didn't want to waste them. This was a lot like making apple pie - without the crust. Arguably, the crust is the best part of apple pie, but don't let that stop you from this alternative. Peel, core and slice the apples, add sugar and cinnamon, lemon juice - and of course - butter (unsalted - best for baking). Then bake for about an hour or until the apples are soft and the liquid like syrup - and let the great smells take over your kitchen. Eat warm. Yum. Boys loved it.

Grated Sauteed Zucchini - Master Recipe #8

Zucchini is wet and messy. I did not fully realize this until this recipe. I knew it had a lot of water in it from the Ratatouille experience, and my usual form of sauteing, but not to this degree. It started with an old PRESTO SALAD SHOOTER, which I've owned for nearly 20 years and usually use to grate cheese or potatoes. Grated Zuchs are sticky. All that water. I will never do this again. What a pain. Once you've grated it and sprinked it with salt, you pick it up in handful and SQUEEZE and TWIST into a clean soft kitchen towel to get the extra water out.

It took two towels and they were soaked afterward- and green - and I'm sure they were also missing trace fibers later found in my zucchini.

After you squeeze, sautee your mushy zucchs in butter and scallions. It only takes a few minutes.

Note: I usually like to sautee zucchini and yellow squash. Here's how I normally do it. Melt half a stick of butter in a pan. Add sliced zucch and squash. Sprinkly lightly with salt. Cook until soft. Yes the the butter gets watery. Use a slotted spoon. Serve. :))

Special Note #3 - Mustard Coating and Marinade for Roast Lamb

This is the marinade we used for our main dish. Pureed garlic, soy sauce, rosemary, thyme, lemon juice, olive oil and - Dijon mustard - AND of course, I had everything but the right mustard, so I used stone ground. It turned out really brown. I confess I didn't measure everything exactly, and I think I over did it on the soy sauce. The recipe says it's supposed to be like a mayonaisse-like cream. Uhhhhh - not so much. I'm going to try this one again, since nothing about this resembled a mayonaisse-like cream. It was more like muddy water. But it tasted great, and that's what's important!

Roast Leg of Lamb - Master Recipe #7

I feel fortunate to have grown up eating lamb. I can understand why people not raised on it might have an aversion to eating it. If you are one of those people, please try it. Gyros do NOT count!. It's tender and delicious and lean. You can marinade it lemon juice and garlic and it will be perfect. It's easy to make. Even, JC style.

So I made the marinade, and followed the instructions for the lamb. There was hardly any fat, because I skimmed the directions again and trimmed off the thin layer of fat I was supposed to leave on to make a sauce later - hence, no sauce. But we didn't need it. The lamb was brushed with the mustard marinade, and simply roasted until the internal temp reached 145. This is a nice medium pinky gray. Do not be afraid. Pink is good.

Yeah, well, in spite of the T-shirt, I can see that real men don't do pink at my house easily. I had to put it back in the oven for the scardey pants that like their meat overcooked. 145 kills the bacteria!!! No one listens to me. I didn't overcook it though, they still got pink, but less pink than before.

It was so lean, there were no pan drippings that didn't dry immediately. Tender and perfect!! Carved, and served with whole grain rice, tossed salad, stuffed tomatoes provencale, french bread and red wine. An excellent Saturday night meal.

Stuffed Tomatoes Provencale - General Recipe #1

The most important part about making Tomato Provencale is to make sure your sous chef has a clean little finger. This is no easy task, because asking is met with rolling eyes, and the inevitable grunt. Yes, parents have the audicity to hope, when asking is just too much. Select 4 ripe tomatoes, cut in them in half crosswise, scoop out the seeds with your little finger, and turn upside down to drain out the rest of the juice. While the tomatoes are draining, make the stuffing.





I bought a loaf of french bread to have with dinner and we tore off a hunk for fresh bread crumbs. While it's a pain to clean the food processor, fresh bread crumbs are so good. We made too much. Mix with oil, scallions, pureed garlic, olive oil and chopped fresh parsely (thank you, herb barrell - I need some more!). Salt and pepper the inside of the tomato and stuff, then drizzle with olive oil and bake for about 20 minutes. You can prepare this in advance and wait until your main dish is nearly ready to bake. Eat them while they are hot. A perfect side dish with lamb. ( next post)

Tossed Salad - Master Recipe #6

Oh yes - a master recipe for tossed salad. It doesn't get easier and better than this, especially when you have tasty, beautiful, organic romaine lettuce from a work connection. Thanks, Jessy! You can use just one type of lettuce or several, wash thoroughly, dry with a spinner or on a clean cloth, arrange or tear, and toss with dressing. Voila! Even though the dressing was only so-s0 as previously mentioned, green was good.

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Oil and Lemon Dressing - Master Recipe #5

Easy peasy - but better when you actually HAVE dijon mustard, which I did not, so I faked it with mustard and mayonnaise and kept my fingers crossed.( I swear I thought I had some - This is a staple for sandwich lovers like us - but I only had stone ground mustard - delicious, but not dijon). I did buy a zester for this endeavor, because the recipe calls for fresh lemon peel - I usually grate when I have to use peel, but I'm working on my skills here. Zesting is fun. Even Jack liked it. I love the smell of lemon. Anyway, you zest and mash with salt - sort of of like pureeing garlic. I think I'm going to have to invest in a mortar and pestle. I didn't know how much you had to mash to be a master cook.

Anyway, mash and mix with with fresh squeezed lemon juice, mustard, fresh ground pepper and "fine fresh oil" I never think of oil as fine or fresh, but I use EVOO - Good enough! You have whisk well and add the oil slowly for proper emulsion. JC says you can dump it a jar and shake it too, but the oil doesn't mix well that way.

There is a glimpse of this in the next post - a beautiful yellow. It tasted OK, but more bland than I'm accustomed to in a salad dressing. I like spices. Feedback- Jeff and Jack thumbs down - Harrison - OK, but don't go out of your way to make it again. Agreed. It probably would have been better with dijon.

Fish Steaks Braised in Wine and Herbed Fresh Tomato Sauce - Master Recipe #4

There are some things worth almost losing your thumb over. Ordinarily, I would never say eating fish would be one of them, but tonight it was. The recipe calls for any type of fish steak or fillet. We bought fresh tilapia fillets, because it's really the only fish I can eat right now. Mainly, because it's not fishy. I'm a beef girl. Give me time.

It took me three tries to find a pan that worked for this recipe. This was because I stupidly skimmed the recipe 100 times. I didn't read every word before I started. Big mistake. So I first used a glass baking dish, then stoneware, and finally swapped the fish yet again to a roasting pan, because you start and end this dish on the stove top. Hence, mounds of dishes, which I'm avoiding doing the last of by blogging instead. After removing the fish from the baking pan to a hot plate ( excellent accidental dishwasher cycle timing!), you are supposed to boil down the juices until it gets syrupy. Yeah well - I never could tell, but it seemed fine, especially after folding in the final pat of butter before serving. It was a big hit, and except for the freakin' fresh diced tomato part, not too difficult to make.

Special Note # 3- Peeling, Seeding and Juicing Tomatoes

Peeled tomatoes are slippery suckers. This is my second attempt at this process. It's a bitch. It makes me love canned tomatoes even more than I already do. Since I nearly became thumbless tonight, I have a new appreciation for them.



Blanching and peeling is easy. It's fun, actually. Slicing and mushing, not so much. Especially when you have a stinking hang nail on your middle finger. Tonight's dish called for diced tomatoes, which you do a little differently than making pulp. You are supposed to have a device called a potato baller - sounds dirty - I didn't have one, so I cut them in half crosswise and used a knife to scoop the ribs out of the inside. Then you turn them over and slice and dice. It's like they were alive and avoiding the knife. Not easy. I need practice, which I expect I'll be getting a lot of this summer.

The good news is I've perfected the estimate for medium tomatoes to tomato pulp ratio - 2:1.
I used three tomatoes and came out with exactly 1 1/2 cups of diced tomatoes. Write it your cookbooks now - before you forget. Or better yet, check your pantry for a beautiful can.

Plain White Boiled Rice - Master Recipe #3

I've never used a rice cooker, although everyone I know who uses one swears by them. I hate washing gadgets. Ok - I hate washing anything, but especially gadgets. Like the George Foreman grill - what a pain. Anyway, we make rice all the time at our house, because we are always making stir fry, as we did tonight. Orange Beef. Won't find that one in The Way To Cook.

I've always made rice in a pot on the stove top. So imagine my thrill when I discovered that I make rice EXACTLY like JC's master recipe. EXACTLY. Cool. One thing I don't do is set a timer, but I did this time - 12 minutes to check status. It actually needed about 14 minutes. I was also thrilled that it had a few steam holes just like the photo in the book - really! Anyway, routine cooking tonight - boring, but another one down!

Special Note #2 - Creme Fraiche - for use in Cherry Clafouti

I was relieved to find this note early in the book. I had a recipe for Cherry Clafouti that called for creme fraiche, and I wasn't sure exactly what that was - I just knew it was bad. Turns out, it's REAL bad. You whisk one cup of heavy whipping cream with one cup sour cream and you are done. If you don't have room in your fridge for a while, that's fine too, because you can leave it out for a few hours, supposedly to make it more sourish. JC's book has a recipe for pear clafouti, but I'd rather make that one in season this fall.

So I took on Martha' Stewart's challenge instead. Halving and pitting cherries takes a looooong time. You need 12 ounces. I was happy we had a postal scale that we used to weigh pinewood derby cars with way back when - it weighs cherries pretty good too! Butter and sugar a flan pan. Spread the cherries evenly across the botton of the pan. I got greedy with the cherries and tried to add a few more than the recipe called for. Don't do this. It ruins the pretty floating to the top later. 12 ounces is just fine for a 9 inch pan. Mix eggs, flour, whole milk, creme fraiche, sugar and vanilla. Poor this through a sieve over the cherries to filter out any flour bits that didn't blend.

Now this is the important part. Make sure you have pan that say - DOESN'T HAVE TWO PIECES THAT COME APART! - These are for crusts and heavy cakes. Not custard. Yeah well, thankfully I put my flan pan on a cookie sheet before doing the stupid thing of pouring my creamy concoction in the wrong type of pan and watching it seep right through onto the cookie sheet. My yelping was a quickly attended to by Jeff, who, after reminding me how stupid that was, grabbed the foil and began the rescue. He lifted and I wiped, and he layed out the foil to cover the bottom of the pan on a new cookie sheet. We didn't loose any more custard and after 30 minutes , were enjoying warm clafouti dusted with powdered sugar. It's good thing I had the aluminum foil melt down the day before, or I would have been screwed BIG time. Isn't it it beautiful? (except that one part at the top where I tried to squeeze in extra cherries:))

Cooked Lentils - Master Recipe #2 - For use in Lentils Matrie d'Hotel

Using random things I have on hand is my favorite way to clean out the pantry. I had a bag of brown lentils, which you can buy for practically nothing in the rice and bean section. JC says to wash and sort through the lentils, picking out debris. Once you tell your teenager to look for pebbles in his beans, he's not very likely to eat them later, so I screwed that one up. They soaked for an hour, and then cooked to perfection in 15 minutes.

To make the Lentils Matrie d'Hotel, puree garlic
and saute in butter. Be sure to do this over low to medium heat so you don't burn the garlic, and then fold in the
cooked lentils. Squeeze a few drops of lemon juice over them, and toss with fresh herbs, such as oregano and basil. I just happen to have a barrel of fresh herbs - how very Martha Stewart of me!


The Lentils smelled great and tasted delicious. The buttered garlic was just perfect.

Special Note #1 - Pureeing Garlic

Peppered throughout The Way To Cook, there are
"Special Notes", containing techniques or tips for
preparing additional ingredients to use in the recipes. I'm adding them here as we do them, numbering only to keep count. I've never made any recipes that ever called for pureed garlic before, so this was something new. You basically mince it very fine, add a pinch of salt, which softens the garlic, and mash with the flat side of your knife. Mash as I might, it never looked "pureed". It looked like salt mush with particles in it. Turns out you can also use a garlic press, add salt and rub it with a spoon on the side of your bowl. There's always a next time!

Ratatoullie - Master Recipe #1

I chose Ratatouille for our first project recipe, mainly because I thought I could trick Jack into being interested due to his love the movie by the same name. We started our day at the Farmer's Market, selecting fresh eggplant, zuchinni, tomato, peppers, onions and garlic. Easy enough, right?

It took more than 2 hours to make! Blanching, peeling, juicing and seeding tomatoes was way messier than I considered!! And also - it's nearly impossible to figure out how many medium size tomatoes you need to make three cups of tomato pulp. We totally underestimated, and hence our Ratatouille was light on the tomato side, heavy on the pepper side. We pureed garlic by mincing and pressing with salt, something I've never done before and will count among the techniques we learn in this project. I also didn't know how wet eggplant and zuchinni were on the inside. You have dry them and pat them on paper towels to get the extra water out, and you also have to bake just the eggplant alone for 20 minutes before you assemble the rest of the dish.

So I'm slicing and dicing, and Jack is patting and drying, and we are ready to bake the eggplant. I'm feeling pretty good because I think we are going to pull it off - We line the cookie sheets with eggplant, Jack paints them with olive oil and sprinkles thyme and oregano and we are ready to cover them with foil for the initial bake. Except - We don't have any foil. We have wax paper, parchment paper, saran wrap, 2 gallon jumbo zip lock bags, snack zip lock bags and freezer paper. NO ALUMINUM FOIL.

So I go outside, where Jeff and Harrison are in the batting cage, to confirm we are out of foil and to make sure it's not in the garage for some weird purpose. I ask H to go to the store, and he replies "why can't you do it?" Jeff says he needs to hit one more bucket of balls and then he go get the foil. Do I have time for this? It's 400 degrees in my kitchen and we don't have the air on yet this summer! I don't know what will happen if I bake it without the foil, but I do it anyway. It worked out.

Ratatouille is a beautiful dish when made the Julia Child way, layering your vegetables and baking. Jeff said it was pretty good - right before he doused it with tabasco sauce.

-N

The Way To Cook Project Rules

-We don't have to make every recipe, but we do have to at least make the Master Recipes. Thankfully there is only one master recipe that calls for organ meat.

-We have to use onions no matter what. Huge sacrifice on my part. I hate onions, but I'm the only one.

-We have to keep the kitchen island free of clutter. This will be the biggest challenge. Isn't everyone's island a mess?

-Obsession is not healthy. We are committed, but have not set a timeline for the project. We are trying to have fun, not kill ourselves.

-We have to blog about our experiences. Jack is opposed to this, as he finds blogs annoying.

And so we begin

I was listening to an author read audio version of the memoir, Julie and Julia , and feeling in a bit of a funk myself, when it occured to me that I didn't have to live her adventure vicariously. As a newlywed in 1990, I fell victim to the tempation of a Double Day book club offer of free books with a minium commitment to purchase 4 books at the regular price. Not too long after, The Way to Cook was on it's way to my mail box along with several other books I've long since passed to others. I even pasted a book label with my name on it on the inside cover. Proof that at one time you could actually read my handwriting! This book
has remained largely unused and unopened over
the last 19 years. In fact, I can promise you I've never even actually followed a recipe in it - I only took it out to look a the photos from time to time.

So my family and I won't be Mastering the Art of French Cooking like Julie, but we are going to give a good college try to the master recipes in this book. We've set up a few rules for the project and we'll be starting tomorrow. We hope any readers enjoy our tales from the kitchen.
-N