the SIMMER blog

cook this now: green peach salad

I have a recipe problem. The problem is this: I read so many food blogs and magazines that I will often suddenly be struck with the desire to make a particular dish, realize that I read a recipe for it about a week before, and then... realize that I have absolutely no idea where I read that recipe or how to find it again.

This summer, that happened with a salad made of unripe peaches. I wanted it. I craved it. I was at a loss. So I turned, as I do in these situations, to Twitter.

And miraculously, the cookbook author Melissa Clark offered to send me a recipe from her book Cook This Now, which wasn't even coming out til October. Guess what? Now that it's October, I can tell you about this salad, since now you can go buy your own copy of Cook This Now and get the recipe.

I made it with nectarines:

 

And then again with white peaches:

 

And it was just perfect on the side of a nice shrimp saute with bacon and scallions.

 

It's a not-quite-sweet, not-quite-savory mix of ingredients, since the peaches/nectarines are unripe enough to be hard, and there's olive oil, and there's basil. And what else? Well, if you're craving the salad, now at least you know where to find the recipe.

Thanks, Melissa!

steak au poivre

This is another one of those uh-oh-we-need-dinner-what-to-do kinds of things. I generally have a hanger steak or two around, in the freezer if not in the fridge, so in the Tuesday night scramble of the workweek, we often end up with that. And after eighty kazillion of them coated with a Southwest-ish dry rub, you can bet I was looking for something different.

And sometimes, something different is something simply classic. Like steak au poivre. Which just means "with pepper." And so: you need some pepper.

 

And you need some steak.

 
 
And if it's a Tuesday-night-style dinner your choices for vegetables are probably zucchini or a bag of frozen peas, so let's go with the zucchini.

 

Sear, saute, boom.

 

Yes, hurrying dinner doesn't always allow for precision lighting and photo evidence. But I assure you, it tasted pretty great.

 

tomato panzanella

So here's one of the great ironies of cooking for other people: sometimes I end up making things I don't even like. Not because they're not good, but because I'm actually a surprisingly picky eater for someone who loves food so much. The list of things I don't care for is awfully long -- all kinds of melons, cucumbers, eggs, fishy fish, chicken salad, canned tuna, most hams, and most definitely tomatoes, among other things.

But I'm not allergic to any of those things, I just don't like them. So if I think something would round out a meal, I'll incorporate it anyway, and that is most definitely true of summer tomatoes.

 

In this case, the main course of my five-course corn menu was rich and heavy, and I knew a slightly acidic, fresh-tasting vegetable counterpoint would be great. 

 

So I cut up a few pounds of multicolored tomatoes and got them ready to go.

 

Then I added glugs of olive oil and red wine vinegar, chopped up a couple shallots, and seasoned with salt and pepper and fried capers and red pepper flakes. And then I called in my trusty sous chef, to whom I am married, to tweak the flavors until they came out right. Then we let it sit for a couple hours as the time for the dinner party came ever closer.

 

As is so often the case, there was one more step to complete at the last minute, and I am notoriously bad at remembering to take pictures at the last minute. But you finish this off with a cubed and toasted loaf of bread -- croutons, basically -- which can be any kind of crusty bread, but in this case I used onion foccacia. That tomatoey-acidic-oil juice gets soaked into the bread and the result is delicious.

(Or so I hear.)

corn dinner part 2: smoked salmon on corn blini

So here's another post in the five-course corn dinner series -- this was course number one.

It's a fairly simple appetizer, and can be done mostly ahead, although the blini are especially good if they're still warm when served. The creme fraiche and smoked salmon are purchased, so that part's simple. And making these blini is as easy as making pancakes. I only tweaked the recipe a tad -- scallion greens instead of chives, just because I couldn't find any chives that day -- although next time I might thin the batter a little bit so the blini come out a bit flatter.

(And we tried adding wasabi powder to the creme as recommended in the recipe, but liked the flavors better without.)

 

apricot and cherry kaiserschmarrn

Okay, so, before stumbling across this recipe in Food & Wine, I had never in my life heard the word kaiserschmarrn. But it sounded pretty tasty, and stone fruit is very much in season, and I thought it'd go pretty well with the sweet corn ice cream I had planned, so I figured I'd give it a whirl.

Of course the market dictated a few changes -- the apricots looked better than the peaches, and ditto the cherries over the blackberries -- and a lot of this had to be done at the last minute, making it not an ideal choice for dinner. Then again, it serves at least six people (we served it to eight) so it's a bit much if you don't have a big group over.

And how pretty are these little guys?

 

Cook the apricots in butter, sugar and lemon juice just until they soften:

 

Ditto with the cherries:

corn dinner part 1: sweet corn ice cream

Yes, it's telling the whole story out of order to talk first about the last course of a dinner -- but, to be fair, I did make the ice cream first. I usually do. Which is one of the most awesome things about making ice cream for a dinner party. Get it done and out of the way the day before (which leaves you plenty of time to sweat about the other things.)

So I used this great recipe from Always Order Dessert, just as written. Unfortunately, I didn't get gorgeous pictures of the finished product like Alexandra did, but here are a couple of process photos.

Corn steeping in milk and cream:

 

Slicing the steeped corn off the cob afterward:

 

 

Straining the liquid to take out all the solid bits:

 

Verdict: delicious stuff. Next time I might try doing a custard-based ice cream, as this one wasn't quite as rich as my favorites, but it certainly went well with its pairing partner, an apricot and cherry pancake called a kaiserschmarrn. (About which more tomorrow.)

 

 

stuffed squash blossoms

So on my farmer's market run for the 5-course corn dinner this past weekend, I noticed a very reasonably priced package of squash blossoms, and I said to myself, "Self: you should pick these up and maybe you could add them to the menu if time permits."

My response probably should have been, "Ha, Self, you ridiculous fool! You know you're always cooking right up to the last minute, you overambitious dinner party menu planner, you. The chances of you having 'extra' time is downright laughable."

I bought the blossoms, and I didn't have the chance to use them at the party, but they were a perfect vehicle for a wonderful mishmash of dinner party leftovers. So, let's call that success!

I wiped them off with a wet paper towel to remove dirt and a bug or two, and laid them out at the ready. And then I concocted a leftover-driven stuffing that I will never in a million years be able to replicate*, but here's the full ingredient list to give you the basic idea:

• about half a cup of fresh ricotta
• some shredded parm
• shredded, cooked golden zucchini with onion and garlic (probably half a cup-ish)
• a quarter-cup or so of crumbled queso fresco
• a tablespoon of mascarpone just to smooth/bind everything
• a quarter-cup of sauteed, chopped mushrooms
• a tablespoon of the leftover corn solids from making corn ice cream (* told you)
• black pepper

 And then I spooned the stuffing into the blossoms, and twisted them neatly at the top to close.

 

And while most squash blossom recipes I've seen call for breading and frying, for health reasons I decided to just saute unbreadded blossoms instead, and I have to say, I think it was totally the right call.

5-course corn dinner

This was one of those weekends that just flew by! Mainly because I spent most of it shopping and prepping for a dinner for eight friends, building a theme around one of my favorite foods.

Corn.

 

More detail soon, but in the meantime, here are the five courses I made (with links to some recipes I drew from):

• Smoked Salmon on Corn Blini
• Esquites
• Corn Vichysoisse (from the Union Square Cafe cookbook)
• Gnudi with Corn and Almonds (gnudi from another Union Square Cafe cookbook, sauce improvised)
• Tomato Panzanella (improvised)
• Kaiserschmarrn with sweet corn ice cream

(All so very delicious.)

chicken scarpariello

Time for some more healthy cooking experiments!

So as fairly devout watchers of "Best Thing I Ever Ate", we here Chez Simmer were excited to see a new crop of episodes start appearing on the DVR back in June. And on one hand, you can sort of see how they're starting to stretch themselves thin, but on the other hand, there really are always new places out there, and the nicest thing about being a home cook is that you don't even necessarily have to travel to be inspired by the show. You can take inspiration from what they're doing, and bring it into your own kitchen.

So is this the chicken scarpariello that Anne Burrell raved about having at Rao's in Vegas? Not really. But is there now a chicken scarpariello we rave about having here at home? There sure is.

 
Seriously, I've made it about four times now, and unfortunately I didn't document every little step, so you're left with these pictures of one of the iterations, which was not the absolute final version we loved.

 
But it gives you the basic idea. Now, if you want the official Rao's version, you can find the recipe here, which involves bone-in chicken and a pretty large batch size.

What we ended up with in the final supertasty iteration:

• surprisingly, boneless skinless chicken breasts cut into cubes instead of larger skin-on bone-in chicken pieces. Yes, the bone imparts some flavor, but it means a longer cooking time, less flavor penetration into the meat, and a much messier eating experience. Plus that whole health thing. And as long as the liquid isn't allowed to boil too vehemently, the white meat stayed decently tender.
• regular sweet red peppers were $6.99 a pound at the store. Cubanelle peppers (mild, pale green) were $2.99. I bought cubanelles. They rocked.
• cut up the cherry peppers instead of leaving them whole.
• keep the liquid minimal, and go heavy on the brine.
• actually, add extra brine at the end.
• and then let it sit in the fridge an extra day. Seriously.

The sour tang of the cherry pepper brine really gives this a neat flavor profile, especially when it has that extra day to soak in. As you can tell, I thought serving it with quinoa and green beans was a fine idea, although it was also good served in a deep bowl as more of a stew.

Best thing I ever ate? Maybe not. Best chicken scarpariello I ever ate? Darn tootin'. 

easy tapas: piquillo confit

Okay, so, don't even worry about that "confit" in the title. That makes it sound all fancy. Maybe when you serve this, if you're trying to impress people, you trot out the fancy word. But if you're cooking it, it's more like "you take some peppers out of a jar and you cook them a long time without even touching them and something MAGICAL happens."

 
Thank you, Jose Andres.

So the only thing you need to worry about with this recipe is finding the piquillo peppers. Regular sweet red peppers just aren't the same. I usually track down my piquillos at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods, and keep a couple jars on hand. And even though I absolutely love to make tapas (mainly because I love to eat them, and because I continue to be profoundly, persistently bad at estimating quantities) I had never turned to this recipe in Jose Andres' "Tapas" cookbook before, simply because I also like to stuff piquillos with goat cheese as a make-ahead appetizer-type tapa, and serving two different preparations of the same pepper didn't really seem like the right way to go.

But now, having made these? I will be making them again every single time the opportunity presents itself.

First, you just lay down a layer of peppers in an ovenproof dish.

 

Then you puree a couple more peppers with some water.

 
Chop up a few cloves of garlic, and spread half the puree over the layer of peppers, and scatter half the garlic over that.

 
Then you repeat: another layer of peppers, another layer of puree and garlic.

Oh, and then you pour olive oil all over it.