Guest Post: Scallop Sauce with Olive Oil, Garlic and Hot Pepper

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I just put on a t-shirt. Not only did I put it on inside-out but I also managed to put it on backwards. Maybe I'm not in the best state of mind to write a blog post?

Whatever. This is another of my brother's pastas from my recent trip to St. Louis. For the past 2 years, he's been raving about how great it is and how I really need to make it. He even took pictures of the recipe and e-mailed it to me. However, my near constant obsession with Asian food got in the way and I never got around to it. James decided to chef it up for me so here we go. This recipe is taken from the previously recommended Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan.

P.S. I keep hot sauce on my desk the way most people keep pens and pencils. Just thought I'd share.

INGREDIENTS

1 lb fresh bay or deep sea scallops (my brother swears by the bay scallops, says they're much better than the sea scallops for this recipe)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon garlic chopped very fine
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
Red chili flake to taste
Salt
1 lb pasta (cookbook recommends spaghettini or spaghetti)
1/2 cup dry, unflavored bread crumbs, lightly toasted in oven or in a skillet

1. Rinse scallops and pat dry. If using bay scallops, leave as is. If using sea scallops, cut into 3/8 inch thick slices.

2. Put olive oil and garlic in a large pan, turn heat to medium and cook until garlic is colored a light gold. Add parsley and hot pepper, stir and toss in scallops and salt to taste. Turn heat to high and cook until scallops turn white. Taste and add additional salt or red pepper if needed. The cookbook points out that if the scallops shed a lot of liquid, remove them from the pan and boil down the water juices and then add the scallops back into the pan.

3. Toss the scallop sauce with the cooked pasta, add bread crumbs, toss again and eat!

Thanks, James! Really tasty and much, much better than the shaking beef stew. :)

Guest Post: Bucatini all'Amatriciana

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Loyal readers might remember these two posts: #1 & #2 and my little brother is back for another round of pasta posts! I'm not much of an Italianophile but his pasta is pretty much the best I've ever had. That's right, I went there.

My brother's Italian food bible is the excellent and widely available Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan.

INGREDIENTS

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon butter
1 medium onion chopped fine
A 1/4 inch thick slice of pancetta, cut into strips 1/2 inch wide and 1 inch long (Pancetta is salt and spice cured like American bacon but isn't smoked. James also doubled the amount of pancetta and cut it into simple chunks)
1.5 cups canned imported Italian plum tomatoes, drained and cut up
Dried red chili pepper flakes to taste
Salt
3 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons freshly grated romano cheese
1 pound pasta (James used bucatini pasta. So fun to eat! It's kinda like spaghetti but hollow on the inside.)

1. Put oil, butter and onion in a sauce pan and heat over medium flame. Saute the onion until it is a pale gold then add pancetta. Cook for a minute. Add the tomatoes, chili flake and salt. Gently simmer for 25 minutes. Taste for seasoning.

2. Toss the cooked pasta with the sauce. Add cheeses, toss thoroughly and eat!

So easy and so good. Please try!

Guest Post: Irvin's Frittata (with video!)

My buddy Irvin and I went on a man-date and saw Cloverfield. It's better than I thought it was going to be. However, if you become nauseous when you view shaky camera work, avoid this movie. Afterwards, we didn't know what to do so, naturally, we went to a bar to talk things over. A few beers later, we started to feel hungry and decided to chef up dinner. Since we were next door to Irvin's apartment, he shouldered the cooking duties.

He decided to make a frittata. Click the link if you're unsure what a frittata is.
Most of the ingredients...not shown, garlic.
Chop, chop chop.
So here's what goes into the frittata:
5 stems of rapini (sliced into 1/2 inch pieces)
5 cloves of garlic (minced)
1/2 an onion (cut into half-moons)
7 brussels sprouts (quartered)
4 small potatoes cut up into rapini sized pieces
A dozen (???don't really remember...we started with 8 then added a few more) eggs
4 oz of cubed pancetta.
a handful of chopped, pitted olives
cheese for grating, whatever you have on hand will be fine.

Here's Irvin explaining the origins of the dish.

Soooo, do I still sound like a complete nut?
Here was my contribution...crack and beat the eggs.
Season well (salt and pepper) as the eggs will be the seasoning for nearly everything else.

Time to start the cooking...
Add a touch of oil to the pan. Saute pancetta, onions and potatoes...cook over low heat until the potatoes are partially cooked through:
No cooking is complete without a beverage by your side...sparkling sake:


Once the onions/potatoes are at the desired state of doneness, toss in the brussels sprouts, garlic and rapini and let that saute for 5 or so minutes. You just wanna pre-cook the veggies because the egg cooks rather quickly.

Add the beaten eggs:
Cook until the eggs are partially set on the bottom...use lowish heat because you don't want the bottom to burn.

Grate the cheese over the top of the frittata
and place into a pre-heated oven. I don't remember what temperature but, if you did it correctly, the bottom and middle of the frittata should already be cooked through. You are just cooking the top 1/3.

Finished frittata:
Irvin checking to see if it was cooked through:
It wasn't so Irvin chucked it back into the oven.

When it is cooked through, give it 10 minutes to rest. Cut into wedges and serve. Irvin likes his with warmed tortillas.
Mmmmm, monch, monch, monch...

Guest Post: Spaghetti with Garlic, Onions and Pancetta

My little brother cooks lots of Italian food and he's quite proud of many of his dishes. Back when he started cooking for himself, he absolutely RAVED about this pasta dish. I promised him that I would try to cook it but never did so now that I am visiting him in St. Louis, he can cook it for me! Sorry if this opening is less than stellar...I'm super frazzled cause my mom just got here and it's been a bit overwhelming!

This recipe is pretty much straight out of Molto Italiano. James also raves about Marcella Hazan's cookbooks but that's for another post.

Here we go:

First up, pictures of their refrigerator:For some reason, James and his GF were somewhat ashamed of the Hershey's chocolate syrup...not really sure why. Not a whole lot of note in this fridge.


Start boiling a large pot of water for pasta.
Mince garlic and pancetta. This represents about 1/2 of a pound of pancetta and a few cloves of garlic. The recipe calls for 2 cloves of garlic but James likes extra so he uses extra.

Next, cut up a red onion into half moons.
The assembled mis en place.
Some of you may have noticed the latex gloves James is wearing. We're not going to go there...

Also, mince about 1/4 cup of Italian parsley. Grate 3/4 cup of Pecorino-Romano cheese. Set aside until the end.

A couple of tablespoons of olive oil and the pancetta in a pan over low heat...allow the fat to render out of the pancetta:
Pancetta in a pan with a teaspoon of dried chili peppers (actually, James used a bit more than a teaspoon but a teaspoon should be sufficient):
A little later on during the cooking process:
Add the onion and garlic:
Onions will soften after 5 or so minutes:
Take the onions/pancetta off of the heat. Start cooking the pasta.
Add the cooked pasta (this is a full pack of spaghetti) and toss:
Bonus action shot!
Add the chopped parsley. Add 1/2 cup of the grated cheese. Plate up. Finished product:
Add more cheese to taste.

This was super tasty. The noodles are covered in the wildly flavorful pork fat/chili oil and the bit of sweet onion and parsley add a nice counterpoint. I like this so much that I might try to make it myself! Good work, James.

Guest Post: Flan

A few weekends ago, my violent-drunk of a roommate made chocolate souffles. He's already written the text so it would be easy for me to blog it but, just to spite him, I am going to refrain from putting up the post until the cut on my wrist has healed. Yep, gotta love those hedges.

Instead, I am here to blog flan! The charming and vivacious Nichole mentioned that she had an old family recipe for flan and I thought that it would be fun if we cooked it and turned it into a guest post. Before I get to the actual cooking, I HAVE to post a picture of her fridge. She lives with 5 other girls so, as you can imagine, their fridge is a real work of art:
Do pay attention to the giant, family pack of tortillas and multiple (FOUR!!! edit: Nichole has informed me that there is a hidden fifth carton somewhere in there) cartons of eggs.
Here's the door:
Nothing terribly exciting here but I really enjoyed checking out the fridge and the hieroglyphic-like code found on all of the food. Very entertaining.

Let's get serious:
Very simple, nothing too fancy. Preheat oven to 350.

Pour the sweetened condensed milk, the evaporated milk, and the tablespoon of vanilla extract into a bowl. Crack and beat three eggs and add to the milk/vanilla mixture. Blend to combine. Allow to sit so any air bubbles have a chance to dissipate.

Make the caramel. Pour 3/4 cup of sugar into a pan and turn to med-low heat. Keep an eye on the pan or this can happen:
If this happens, we discovered that burnt sugar is water soluble so add some water, bring to a boil and that'll make clean-up a cinch.

Start fresh and this is close to what you want:
Pour this caramel into the bottom of a pie tin:
Pour the egg/milk mixture over the caramel:
As you can see, we have already placed the pie tin in a shallow roasting pan. Pour hot water into the roasting pan until the water is just under the rim of the pie tin.
The water is cloudy because some of the custard mixture spilled into it.

We checked on ours after 40 minutes. Nichole gave it a jiggle but the custard jiggled back because it wasn't quite set. We sent it back into the oven and waited another 10 minutes. This time, it was done.
Nichole says it's best to let the flan cool until it's no longer warm but, after 25 minutes, we could no longer wait. Here's a slice:
Yum-yum, I had seconds. And so cheap! I don't have exact food cost numbers but Nichole mentioned that the entire recipe cost something around 3 bucks. Many thanks to Nichole and maybe we can cook something else out of your family cookbooks, yes?

I must say, I had an enormous amount of fun collaborating on this project. It also makes me wonder about some of my other readers. Do any of you have any recipes that you'd like to share with me? I am more than happy to travel to your kitchens and pay for the ingredients. Let me know!!!!

Guest Post: Shepherd's Pie

Boy, how many shepherds are in a shepherd's pie? hahaha, if only the joke were grammatically correct. but seriously, folks, I've got a midterm in two hours and I'm doing everything BUT studying. I even practiced the violin for a bit and, for those of you who know my long, checkered past with the instrument, that's a HUGE deal. Related rates and exponential change...blah, blah, blah.

Anyhow, I'm puttting up Jorge's guest post. hahaha, I'm listening to the last movement of Mozart #35 "haffner"...let's sing along...

My name is geor-gie
I made shepherd's pi-ie
Won't..you...read..my guest post.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaha, I truly am a huge nerd. Here's Jorge:

Shepherd’s pie

My only experience with shepherd’s pie before now was eating it in my college cafeteria at Peabody. The food here there was notoriously bad, and of all the crappy food they slopped out, shepherd’s pie was possibly the worst.

In this entry, I will try to make a shepherds pie that I might actually choose over a dinner of cheerios and milk, like I would back in college.

Ok, here’s what we are working with. This is sort of a healthy version using ground turkey. You could probably use any ground meat you want to. Also, I’m using corn instead of peas.

Chopped shallots, diced carrot, frozen corn, ground turkey, Worcestershire, oil, chicken stock, thyme, and bay leaves for the meat base

Potatoes, milk, eggs, and butter for the mashed potatoes.

Start by sautéing up the shallots and carrots in some oil, and add the thyme and bay leaf

Add ground turkey, brown, and add some stock.

Cook this for about 20-30 minutes until the stock is mostly reduced. This is probably still too liquidy.

For the mashed potatoes, peel and boil potatoes, add egg yolks (about 2 per pound of potato) milk, butter, and plenty of salt and white pepper.

Ok, time to assemble the pie:

And time to put in the oven, 375 until it’s golden brown.

(ed. doesn't this look EXACTLY like cornbread?)

And here is the final dish! It was pretty good, very hearty and satisfying.

Thus sayeth my roommate. I have to say, I'm a HUGE fan of Shepherd's Pie and this was a pretty good one. Very, very comforting. Anyways, I'm going to go memorize a few trigonometric identities. Don't you wish you were me?