My First Foray Into "The Flavor Bible"

Rachel here.

My brother, S., gave me a cookbook for Christmas that I've been meaning to dive into as soon as I found myself with a little leisurely time. The Flavor Bible by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg is unlike any other cookbook we own. Instead of recipes, as one might expect, it offers flavor combinations, ingredient by ingredient. So cool! So often I find myself cooking and unsure of what to pair with what absent a step-by-step recipe. This book is just the ticket for such moments.

I've been wanting to make soup for a while (ok, all winter). With the aid of The Flavor Bible, I concocted a totally delicious chicken, mushroom and white bean soup in a lemony garlic broth.

To start, I made chicken stock. I'm yet to find a store-bought version that comes anywhere near the homemade stuff and so, for the time being, homemade is how we're rolling when it comes to chicken stock in our house. I piled a stockpot full on chicken bones and one complete breast, big hunks of celery, wedges of onion and halved carrots. A few bay leaves and brimming with water, I let the stuff simmer for hours until our whole house smelled warm and welcoming. I strained the vegetables and bones out, shredded the chicken from the breast and set it aside in the fridge along with the strained stock until evening.

The trick to making your own stock, as I learned from my Great Uncle David, is to leave time for it to chill in order for the fat to solidify on the top. Then, before you put it back on the stove to generate your soup, you can scrape the fat from the top quite easily. It is far preferable to the oily skimming I've done in the past, both in terms of ease and effectiveness.

For the soup proper, I diced up half an onion and a few stalks of celery and sliced three carrots. Into a saute pan they went until they were browned and softened, at which point I added them into my stock pot. Then I sliced and sauteed mushrooms, adding these to the soup once they were browned along with the shredded chicken and the juice from one lemon. I minced a few cloves of garlic and thinly sliced another lemon (a la my grandmother's chicken soup), tossing these in towards the end along with a rinsed can of white beans. I simmered the soup a bit longer, adding a generous dash of hot sauce and salt and pepper to taste until everything came together. John (using store-bought pizza dough) whipped up some breadsticks (rolled in parmesan and fennel seeds and other delicious things that he can't recall...he doesn't need The Flavor Bible's help the way I do) which finished baking just in time for us to heap soup into bowls and sit down for a cozy dinner on a rainy night.

Sick? Soup!

Hey Ma-

So, I had plans. Not big plans, but fresh vegetable plans. I was going to make egg noodles with green beans, mushrooms, those little grape tomatoes (I could eat these by the cup) and fresh grated parmesan cheese. It wasn't going to be fancy, but it was definitely going to be good and I was really looking forward to it.



And then the plague happened.

Not the real plague, but our first full-on, everybody's-down-for-the-count family-wide illness. I thought I had been sick before, but I now know that you have NEVER been sick until you've had a baby (ok, not really...I'm only talking about illnesses that come and go within a week's time). I did not know what it was like not to be able to sleep all day and all night, waking only to blow your nose or pull the tissue out from your sweatpants that somehow weaseled its way in there while you were snoring (blissfully!) through two nostrils with--yup, you guessed it--tissues stuck in them. I did not know. But I digress...

The byproduct of the arrival of the plague was a complete and utter lack of desire to make the aforementioned dinner. In fact, I can't even remember what we ate during those days of disease. What I was left with, then, was a bunch of vegetables on the brink of turning.





As I know I've mentioned before, we often have portions of homemade chicken stock in our freezer. As of late, I've been saving our vegetable bits in a bag in the freezer to, all in the name of letting them accumulate and turning them into soup one of these days. Yesterday was just the day.

M and I thawed the stock, chopped the veggies, sauteed them and combined everything. A sprinkle of that parmesan from the dinner-that-never-was on top, a piece of toast, and I am one happy eater.



(Ok, maybe M was more into her new dinosaur booties than our kitchen project, but I can dream...)

XXOO
-R

Homemade Pasta

Rachel here: When John and I were first together, one of our favorite things to do was cook. Prior to meeting John, I worked in restaurants and lived alone. Outside of work (where I was heartily fed), I mainly subsisted on grits and fruit. Though I would definitely relate differently to cooking for myself now than I did then, at the age of 19 or 20, my top goal in eating at home was to generate as few dirty dishes as possible. Anyway, enter John. Here was a man who not only enjoyed but excelled at cooking, who wanted to make me dishes of food I had never tried and who genuinely enjoyed eating. On our way home from work, walking our bikes instead of riding so that we could talk, we'd more often than not get to talking about dinner and stop by the grocery store en route to pick up the various ingredients we'd need to make whatever had struck our fancy. To shop and eat in this fashion felt incredibly luxurious. Fast forward five years and, as a general rule, we no longer spend our afternoons and evenings planning and generating whimsical meals. We are busy, busy bees these days and no longer live nearly across the street from a fantastic grocery as we did in our earlier days. Still, though, one of my favorite ways to spend the twilight hours of a weekend home with John is over a completely homemade meal that we have prepared together. The food tastes and feels so good and I couldn't ask for better company.

This past weekend afforded us just such a window to get into the kitchen together. A few years back, John convinced me that homemade pasta is significantly better than its store-bought counterpart and, though we usually end up eating the latter for its convenience, this weekend John taught me how to make pasta by myself. It is surprisingly easy, though it does take a little muscle, and we generated two lasagnas from our endeavors, one for dinner and one for the freezer for the days after M makes her grand debut. If you've never tried your hand at pasta making before, I highly recommend that you give it a whirl. It is simple and satisfying and really, truly the best way to eat pasta.


Ingredients
1 egg (supposedly the fresher the better)
1 c. all-purpose flour
water
semolina flour

Method
In a large bowl, form the all-purpose flour into a well. Crack the egg into the center of the well and stir with a fork. As you stir the egg, it will gradually pull flour in. Keep at this until you are completely unable to stir anymore. At this juncture, add a teaspoon of water. Once all of your flour has been combined with another ingredient (either egg or water, or both), turn it out onto your countertop. Knead, twist and fold diligently until the dough becomes incorporated. Add more water, no more than a teaspoon at a time, whenever you are convinced that there isn't a single additional drop of moisture to be utilized towards forming a coherent ball of dough. This kneading process should take at least 15 minutes (in my experience). Once you have a ball of dough, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and let rest for 45 minutes. Roll it out as thinly as you desire (either using a pasta roller or a rolling pin) and then cut into your desired shape. I folded my dough, dusting it with semolina flour between layers so the pasta wouldn't stick to itself, before cutting so I could get uniform shapes. Voila! Cook as you would normally cook pasta, though you should know that homemade pasta will cook noticeably faster than the dried store-bought stuff.



For our lasagna, we mixed chopped scallions and basil in with the ricotta (along with some salt and pepper) and sauteed spinach and mushrooms with garlic before layering everything with parmesan cheese and tomato sauce. Yum! What will you do with your delicious pasta?



Janet here: What I plan to do with the delicious lasagna I now know is waiting for me, not M, is eat it and enjoy every last bite. I know for a fact that homemade pasta is absolutely the way to go, but the likelihood that I will add this to my culinary life in the near future is, well, zero. I will, however, promise to fill the hole in the freezer that is made when I eat Rachel and John's lasagna.

tomato sauce

Rachel here: For those who've been following, you know I've been meaning to get around to making a big batch of pasta sauce to freeze. I have this idea that somehow between now and when the baby comes (at the end of June) I will not only baby-fy my house, get straight As in school, spend lots of quality time with John and make sure to do some stuff just for myself, but that I will also somehow prepare and freeze months worth of food so that we can be well-fed during those early sleepless months. It's a great idea, sure, but I am increasingly aware that there is no way this entire dream to-do list is going to get done. I'm trying, instead, to focus on the little victories, to incorporate a little of each of these things into the coming days and weeks and to figure that, though the baby isn't here yet, this is just a glimpse of the impending upheaval in our home. But anyway, I now have two large jars of frozen pasta sauce that, some summer evening, I am sure I'll be glad I took the time to make last night.

I should say that I love making pasta sauce. I've only done it twice, but there's something so liberating about cooking without a recipe. Pasta sauce is up there with making soups for me, both leisurely and informal with lots of stirring (I think stirring calms my brain down). Plus, the end result is a hearty and simple meal that is virtually guaranteed to put a smile on the faces I'm feeding, along with my own. What do you like in your pasta sauce?

Mushroom and Olive Pasta Sauce
makes approximately 12 cups

Ingredients
1/2 c. balsamic vinegar
1/2 lg. white onion, diced
1 c. brown mushrooms, sliced
2 lg. cloves garlic, minced
56 oz. whole peeled tomatoes (nope, I didn't mill my own...someday)
15 oz. crushed tomatoes
1 c. olives, chopped (I used kalamata and green italian)
4-6 basil leaves, torn into small pieces
fresh thyme, stripped from stems and to taste
3/4 c. red wine
salt and pepper

Method
In a pan, reduce the balsamic vinegar until thick and sweet. In a large pot, saute the onion. Add the mushrooms once the onion has started to brown, and then add the garlic. Add all of your tomatoes. Add olives, basil and thyme. Add the balsamic reduction a few tablespoons at a time, to taste. If you use up all of the balsamic reduction and you want a sweeter sauce, feel free to add a bit of brown sugar. Add salt and paper to taste before pouring in the wine and bringing sauce to a simmer. Simmer until sauce thickens, around 1 hour, checking periodically. Adjust seasonings as needed. Yum!


Janet here: So, yeah, I used to do homemade tomato sauce back in the day when I was childless and an afternoon puttering around the kitchen making up a huge batch of tomato sauce for freezing was something I had the time and inclination to do. And then the children arrived, and between that and the full-time job, something, as they say, had to give. So my tomato sauce looks like this:



And it is still pretty damn tasty.