the SIMMER blog

itty bitty lobster rolls

One of the things I really enjoy is making humble ingredients taste amazing. But, as I am a Gemini and full of contradictions, I also really enjoy going nuts with the luxury ingredients from time to time. Which is how this happened:

 

Super-fresh lobster. Dispatched (eek!), cooked and cleaned by yours truly.

 
(Yes, it's a lot of work, and it's messy, but from time to time, you just gotta go for it.)

So I took the meat from the tails, claws, knuckles, and legs (Thomas Keller has a great trick for this in the Ad Hoc cookbook -- it involves a rolling pin and works like a charm) and cut it in pieces, not too small.

Then I sliced up a brioche loaf from Bouchon Bakery (also pretty luxe) and toasted in butter. On both sides. Because that's how we roll... when people are coming over. (When we are by ourselves, sometimes we just saute a chicken breast and call it good. Gotta have balance.)

The lobster meat I mixed with just a little mayo, lemon juice, tarragon and/or parsley if you've got it, and pepper. Not too much of any one. Let the lobsterness be the main thing.

For serving, just pile the meat on the toasts. They're best if the toasts are warm and the meat is chilled, but even if everything's room temp, I don't think your guests are going to pass them by. Ours disappeared in a wink.

 
I also tried a mix with celery leaves instead of herbs, and I think I like that even better. But really, the specifics are up to you. Just use a light hand, taste as you go, and you can't go wrong.

 
Lovely and luxurious.

cheesecake ice cream

I don't know what the weather's like where you are, but here in New York City, we have rapidly gone from a foggy, rainy, wintry spring to the WHOA THAT IS HOT heat of summer.

Which has its downsides, obviously. And its upsides too:

 
It means that every dinner party around here ends with ice cream. (Which happens sometimes in the winter, too, but is oh-so-much-better in the summer.)

I think I've mentioned before that one of the things I love about The Perfect Scoop is its wealth of non-custard ice creams. No fussy egg-cookery, just easier-than-pie purees.

This one is just cream cheese, sour cream, lemon zest, a little half-and-half, and sugar:

 

Which you hit with your whirrr stick:

 

Done. Chill for a bit, then churn.

 

As is so often the case, no pictures of the finished product, because we chowed it down. And I apologize for the lousy lighting throughout this post. But would you rather have poorly-lit cheesecake ice cream photos, or no cheesecake ice cream photos at all?

Make this one. You will not be sorry.

life is a this

 

(Things are wonderful around here but oh so busy; I pitted this pound of cherries around 1 a.m. last night. And I haven't even started packing for Eat, Write, Retreat. Eek! But at least life is like the picture above and not the picture below!)

 

cinco de mayo sabroso

In the U.S. it seems that Cinco de Mayo is celebrated mostly with margaritas and Coronas. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But if you want to try something a bit more ambitious in your Mexican cookery, either in honor of the day or not, here are a few ideas from the archives of the Simmer blog:

• Shrimp in pumpkinseed mole
• Chiles en nogada
• Black bean enchiladas
• Other ideas for enchiladas
• Wholly mole

 

 



secret ingredient: porcini dust

So I'm thinking of starting up a new feature on the blog called "Secret Ingredient." There are so many things that I have around my kitchen that I throw into a recipe to tweak it -- my love of smoked paprika is legendary -- and I think it might be fun to share them with you, one at a time.

So today, let's talk about porcini dust.

This is a relatively new discovery for me, and if you go into a shop asking for porcini dust, you won't find it. Fresh porcini are hard to come by; most porcini are sold dried.

 

These porcini are sitting in my spice grinder, waiting to be pulverized. A few pulses of the grinder, and poof, they become dust.

What can you use porcini dust for? I'm betting it would be a delicious addition to sauces, stews, or anything else liquid-y where a little oomph is needed. Few or no calories, and a delicious earthy umami flavor. I might even try using them to coat a steak before searing it, though that's an untested idea, and in general you'll want something that hydrates them. Otherwise, dust is just dust, no matter how tasty.

But why I made porcini dust in the first place, and how delicious it was, was this:

 
That's pasta flour (middle) and porcini dust (down the sides -- why did I do that?) before adding eggs and oil to make fresh homemade pasta for something I call pappardelle rolls or lasagna rolls. I'll give you the whole rundown on that meal soon. In the meantime, an up-close-and-personal preview:

 

Porcini dust-ed perfection.

kitchen catastrophes on the lipstick chronicles

Hm. That title looks a little odd as a sentence, but Kitchen Catastrophes is the title of my post today over at the group writers' blog The Lipstick Chronicles. There. A little capitalization and a few connective words really help.

Click to read: Kitchen Catastrophes.

Speaking of "connective" things, I'll be guest-hosting LitChat today (Friday): details here. (It's a Twitter thing.)

Happy Friday, and happy weekend, everyone!

the more things change...

So back in some of the earliest days of this blog, I was touting the benefits of enchiladas, and here I am again, in a busy situation, saying: seriously, when in doubt, enchiladas are the way to go. Simple, low-cost, and flexible.

A little more complex but still not expensive: making your own enchilada sauce. (This recipe from Rancho Gordo will do the trick.)

 
This was for book club a couple weeks back, and it did the trick exactly. Large batch, make-ahead, with leftovers I wouldn't be sorry to be eating for days. (As it turned out, actually, there weren't that many left over.)

For the filling, I sauteed a few odds and ends from the fridge: jalapenos, piquillos, and onion, plus some ancho chili powder:

shortbread shortcut

One of the earliest recipes in The Kitchen Daughter is Grandma Damson's Scottish Shortbread. There are a kajillion recipes for shortbread, most of which work fine, but I made this one very simple on purpose. Two cups of flour, two sticks of butter, and a half-cup of sugar. That's all. Ginny does it the old-fashioned way, working the butter into the sugar by hand, and that's the way I'd usually done it as well.

Until last week.

 

Yep, that's a food processor. I was in a rush to crank out some cookies for book club, which I was hosting, and so I decided to use my stand mixer -- except in the close quarters of my kitchen, the stand mixer is currently behind the food processor, so I thought, Eh, I've heard people sometimes use the food processor for doughs and crusts, I guess I'll give it a shot.

Wow. What a shot it was.

 

I made only a half-batch -- so first I creamed a stick of cold butter (salted) with a quarter-cup of granulated sugar, then blitzed in a cup of flour, until the mixture resembled coarse crumbs.

 

Time elapsed? Like, nothing. Maybe literally two minutes. And then there was another time-saving discovery to make: if I patted the crust out on my synthetic cutting board and only rolled it lightly, instead of flouring a wooden board and rolling it thin, I didn't have to worry about the butter melting and making the dough hard to work. It came together in a flash. Pat pat pat:

how to make a georgia peach

New feature on the Simmer blog today: video! The fabulous crew at Simon and Schuster worked with me on a couple of cooking videos for recipes from The Kitchen Daughter, and here's the first: how to make a Georgia Peach.

 

Enjoy!

alfajores plus

So yesterday I told you about making alfajores, and today, a coda: while alfajores are (by definition) made with dulce de leche, I couldn't help making some of my little shortbread sandwiches with an alternate filling.

 
After my homemade dulce de leche disaster, I went out in search of the pre-made product. At my local Morton Williams, I didn't find dulce, but I did find guava jelly, so I thought: why not? Lots of Latin American desserts use guava. And I always like to give people options.

In addition to the general praise at the party I took the alfajores to, there was one other thing that really tickled me: one partygoer discovered that the guava and the dulce versions tasted great together, so he would twist a guava sandwich open like an Oreo, then attach the top and bottom to a dulce sandwich, almost like a club-sandwich version of the cookie. I'll try that myself next time!

The shortbread cookies were very, very delicate, so I made sure to package them carefully. I love the rectangular Tupperware I bought for ice cream containers, and they worked for cookies as well:

 

With napkins underneath, on both sides, at each end, and between. You can never be too careful with these things.