Summer Sweatin'

If you live in the north east, you will know what I mean by this post’s title. Just when I was getting used to the idea of fall, and all the lovely fall flavored things I could start making – Wham! 95°+ with unbearable humidity hits us once again. And after nice cool breezes and earlier sunsets I was dreaming of cinnamon, apples, stews and braises. But all of those dreams were dashed away with this stifling close to summer.

So I changed my thought patterns and picked back up where I left off with summer grilling. I realized Joe and I had not made a lot of the staples we have in summers past. There has been no eggplant for instance this year. Maybe I was waiting for the perfect specimen from the farmer’s market, or maybe I simply overlooked it. There has also been no peach, plum or other stone fruit desserts which makes me feel like I have missed out on something this year.

I have neither a stone fruit dessert nor a grilled eggplant recipe for you today, instead I have lamb. And tzatziki. I love the combination of those two. I did make lamb skewers with yogurt sauce a few weeks ago, but didn’t share the recipe because I didn’t think much of it. In hind sight, however, the yogurt sauce went over well, and these lamb skewers are a bit different.

I had also made these for a friendly food competition last winter while sharing a small kitchen with three other competitors. Although no clear winner was ever determined (at least not to my knowledge) I like some of the reactions I got to this dish. Plus, tzatziki always seems so exotic that it can be a real treat to make at home. I have been hitting the yogurt sauce hard this year - if I could put tzatziki on breakfast cereal I would.

This recipe seems long, but it is really very simple and not too time consuming. They can look a bit phallic if you let them, but if you can overlook that, or reshape the meat to something that is more rated G, then I think you will really enjoy this recipe. Plus, you can get everything ready, then hand it to your grill master and stand in the slightly air conditioned comfort of your kitchen and watch as someone else sweats and cooks for you.

Lamb Koftas
As adapted from Jamie Oliver “Jamie at Home”

This recipe is easily adaptable to what you have on hand. It is important to let the meat rest after you have shaped it onto the skewers, and then to oil them prior to grilling. If you do not want to skewer them, simply shape them into long sausage shapes sans the skewer.

Serve this with pita or other flat bread, or as the topping to a salad as Jamie Oliver suggests in his recipe.

For the koftas
1 ½ lbs. ground lamb (or half lamb and half pork)
½ c. breadcrumbs
¼ c. whole milk
1 egg
½ c. shelled, and crushed pistachios
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. coriander seeds, crushed
½ tsp. fennel seeds
1 Tb fresh flat leaf parsley, chopped
1 Tb garlic, finely chopped (about one large clove)
2 Tb red onion, finely chopped
¼ tsp. red pepper flakes
Zest of 1 lemon
Salt and pepper to taste

Yogurt Sauce
½ c. plain greek style yogurt
2 tsp. garlic, finely chopped
1 Tb. Red onion, finely chopped
3 Tb. Cucumber, cored, peeled and finely chopped
1 Tb. Fresh mint, chopped
Juice of 1 lemon
Salt and pepper to taste

Red Onion garnish (optional)
½ red onion, sliced very thinly
Juice of 1 lemon
1 Tb white wine vinegar
Salt to taste

For the Tzatziki
Combine all the ingredients, and let rest in the refrigerator until ready to serve.

For the Red Onions
These make an interesting addition and since you are already chopping onion, I like to throw this is as well. Combine all the ingredients and toss thoroughly. Let stand at room temperature until ready to serve.

For the Koftas
Combine the breadcrumbs with the milk, adding more milk if necessary. You want the consistency to be that of a thick baby cereal. Then add ground lamb, egg, garlic, onion, spices, parsley and lemon zest and work together until everything is mixed well.

Shape the lamb mixture onto skewers into oblong shapes that are roughly equal in size. Once skewered, place into refrigerator to keep cool until ready to cook.

Prepare grill, and oil the rack. Just before cooking the skewers, oil each kofta to keep from sticking. Grill the skewers for about 4 minutes on each side, or until the meat is cooked all the way through.

Serve with warmed pita, fresh parsley, tzatziki, and red onions. Serves about 4.

A Fig Tree Grows In Astoria

It’s been a while since I have been able to post. From visiting family around the eastern seaboard to attending bachelor and WAG parties, Joe and I have had a very busy schedule. But this does not mean that I wasn’t cooking anything. In fact we did quite a bit of cooking, but after my third cousin asked me why I was taking pictures of food, did I realize, maybe I should just enjoy and not try to document everything I was doing.

I was going to share with you a ‘Winning Cousins Competition Cake’ but a vanilla cake, with vanilla frosting, on a white plate, sitting on top of a white counter, somehow didn’t look as great as I thought it would. Or the giant greek style feast that a four year old helped me prepare could have played a role on this blog. But every time the four year old asked to help, she followed up with “Can I just eat that?”, and when a child asks to eat melon, cucumber, prosciutto, cheese, mushrooms, and peppers - you just don’t say no.  Even if it means sacrificing pictures.

And then last weekend in New York City, I managed to make a baked Challah French Toast for Joe’s birthday, but again when some hungry guests are clamoring for bacon, and you are using your gracious host’s every last plate and platter, you can’t really delay eating with trying to produce the perfect picture. But as our summer travels wind down, I did manage get into the kitchen and prepare something worthy of sharing.

Our hosts in New York have a gigantic fig tree growing in their back yard. Yes that sentence is full of combinations that don’t seem to go together – grow, New York, backyard etc. But they really all do. And when someone insists that you take fresh figs home, you just can’t say no. Plus I like to count that as the “urban foraging” I am so fond of. 

In Maine, it can be hard to find fresh figs. They are either very expensive, or very over ripe and squishy (or sometimes moldy). So I jumped at the chance to take home a container of fresh figs, and try to incorporate them into every meal. In the past, I have broiled figs, and then spread them on toast, or just eaten them raw. But these NYC figs called for something a bit more sophisticated – a pizza.

Now, I’m not claiming to have made this recipe up by any means, but I also did not follow any set guide on making this pizza. So I advise that you do the same to this, follow what you like but disregard anything you do not.

Fig, Prosciutto, and Blue Cheese Pizza

You can use just about anything as the pizza crust. If you have a favorite recipe for homemade dough, or a refrigerated dough you are familiar with. You can even use some premade flatbread tossed on the grill if you are really pressed for time. I used a refrigerated dough, this time, but if you would like my pizza dough recipe – just let me know!

1 lb pizza dough
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
8 oz. soft blue cheese (like a gorgonzola dolce)
½ lb thinly sliced prosciutto, cut into strips
10 fresh figs, sliced and/or quartered
Olive oil
Arugula, rinsed and tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper (optional)

Preheat the oven to a hot 450°F.

Roll out the pizza dough to stretch fairly thin, I have a giant rectangle baking sheet and use that as my form. If you use a pizza stone, try to get two pizzas out of the dough. Drizzle olive oil over the dough and sprinkle evenly with chopped garlic.

Then, finely crumble the blue cheese as you sprinkle it over the dough. Add the prosciutto and figs to the pizza dough. Bake pizza in the oven for about 10 minutes. If using the arugula, pull the pizza out midway through cooking, and add arugula on top. Return it to the oven and finish cooking, the arugula will melt on top.

Pull pizza from the oven and let rest a few minutes before cutting and eating.

Step 4 - Have Heart Attack

Don’t worry I am not actually going to instruct or even encourage you to have a heart attack. It’s just a warning that this indulgent recipe should not necessarily be had every weekend. And the title of this post may clue you in to the fact that we are talking bacon here. I know I have a couple of other recipes that call for cooking bacon, and then cooking onions in the remaining fat – but this one is a little different.

Bacon was a special treat in my house growing up. We might have BLT’s for lunch, and maybe only rarely did we have bacon for a Saturday morning breakfast. Now of course, living with Joe, breakfast meats are a staple on weekends. And if I do not have a breakfast meat available, we trek to a local diner to be sure and fill our quota for the week.

But when I have overnight guests, I do like to wow them with breakfast. And let me tell you, breakfast is not my strong suit. I fill the house with smoke (it doesn’t help that we don’t have an exhaust fan over the stove), I make misshapen and overly brown pancakes and French toast, I get frustrated and give up crying at poached eggs. But all this doesn’t mean that I don’t try.

Thankfully, when some friends from home came to visit last year around Easter, I managed to pull off a pretty decent breakfast. It was so impressive in fact that I actually had a request for the recipe I am about to share. First, however, let me give you a little background.

I used to work at a bar and carry-out restaurant in Washington DC. The carry-out was open for breakfast each morning, and I could entice Joe to drive me to work with the promise of some of Big Daddy’s pancakes. Big Daddy was the grill cook for the breakfast and lunch shifts 6 days a week. I’m not kidding, his name was Big Daddy. Well, not really, but that is how he introduced himself to me when I first started and that is what everyone always called him. Big Daddy’s pancakes were some of the greatest pancakes ever made. When I asked Big Daddy one day what his secret was, he only shared with me a little bit of his magic – bacon. The key he said was to cook the pancakes in the same spot that he cooked bacon on the flat-top gill. It helped that we went through tons of bacon, so there was always plenty to cook the pancakes with.

So on that morning last year, I took out my griddle pan, and laid some bacon down. Once they were finished I cooked some pancakes in the remaining bacon grease and then when the griddle was looking a bit dry, added more bacon and repeated to process. Some of my friends who claim to not really like pancakes went a little crazy for them (as I said, I got a request for this recipe). I was joking that the recipe would be: Step 1 - Cook Bacon, Step 2 – Cook Pancakes in Bacon grease, Step 3 – Have friends ooh and ahh over pancakes. And then a friend commented; Step 4 – Have heart attack. So there we have it, step-4 have heart attack.

But I won’t let you go away with just those steps, I’ll share with you my pancake recipe. This is the one I have been using for years now, and I seem to mess this one up less than any other versions I have tried. Although if you have a favorite pancake recipe, I highly recommend cooking them in bacon fat.

Cheater Buttermilk Pancakes
I never have buttermilk on hand, and if I do buy it, I can never seem to use it all before it spoils. So I cheat and make my own by adding lemon juice to whole milk or half and half. You can do it to skim milk, but it’s not creamy in the end, and don’t use only heavy cream because your end result will be too stiff.

1 c. cheater buttermilk (1 c whole milk or half and half with 1 Tb of lemon juice)
1 Tb vegetable oil
1 egg
1 c. all-purpose flour (I use white whole wheat, and again you might have to add a little more liquid because the whole wheat flour tends to make the batter thicker)
2 Tb sugar
2 Tb baking powder
1 tsp salt

To make the buttermilk, combine lemon juice and milk and let rest for 15 minutes. (I usually begin cooking the bacon, and get everything else ready during the curdling process.) Don’t stir it, just add your lemon juice and let it sit.

Combine all of the dry ingredients for the pancakes together, and after your milk has curdled, combine it to the beaten egg and vegetable oil. Make a well in the dry ingredients and add the wet, stirring until just combined.

Cook the bacon on the same pan that you will cook your pancakes, a flat large griddle works well for this. Start with a few pieces of bacon spread out on the pan, as they cook and shrink you can begin to pour the pancake batter on the pan. Be sure to adjust the temperature of the burner to combat any burnt or smoking bits.

After a few pancakes, the pan will be dry of bacon grease so you can either cook bacon and pancakes simultaneously at this point, or alternate bacon and pancakes in the pan. I like the simultaneous method if you are cooking for a slow to awaken crowd – this way everyone can have warm, fresh from the griddle, bacon and pancakes.

If you need to keep the pancakes or bacon warm, place them on an oven-proof platter and keep in a warm oven until ready to serve.

Or to summarize:
Step 1 – Cook Bacon
Step 2 – Cook pancakes in bacon grease
Step 3 – Have friends oooh and ahhh over pancakes cooked in bacon
Step 4 – Have heart attack

Blueberry Bonanza

As I have mentioned before, I consider myself to be an urban forager, and that includes going to pick-your-own farms to gather the fruits of the field. Well, blueberry season came early this year to Maine. And although I was unable to go picking with the friend who took me strawberry picking, I did manage to squeeze in a trip after work and between thunderstorms one day.

The farm was a bit out of the way, and the owner’s wife didn’t sound very enthusiastic when I called to check picking times. But force myself upon that farm I did! When I got there, the rain had just subsided and an intense damp humidity was still sticking in the air. But, I pulled up into the lonely parking area, and walked to the picking shed for containers and instructions.

The fields were completely empty, except for the family of wild turkeys sneaking in to eat blueberries. I was directed to one bush and told to work my way up from the bottom, so that the weighed down branches would pick themselves up off the ground. There were so many blueberries that I only had to pick one side of the blueberry bush before I had my 5 quarts filled. And if you know me at all, I looked at those five quarts, looked at all the other bushes and thought; Well, maybe I should pick some more. Five quarts isn’t THAT much.

But thankfully I restrained myself and only went home with five quarts. Which really is restraint on my part. Especially after I popped one into my mouth and actually said out loud to the family of wild turkeys “Holy Crap”. These were the biggest, juiciest, sweetest blueberries I had ever had. I have met people who claim to not like blueberries – but I am sure that these little beauties would change their minds.

The next step was to see what I was going to do with 5 quarts of blueberries. Since the weather has been hot and humid recently, the thought of making jam was out of the question. But blueberries freeze very well, and have a decent texture once unfrozen. I kept one and a half quarts out for me to eat and share (and I have been having handfuls of blueberries on ice cream, cereal, and alone all week) which, left three and a half for freezing. Apparently the trick to freezing blueberries is to not wash them before freezing, but I washed and dried some, and then just dumped the rest into reseal-able bags and tossed them into the freezer.

My freezer now has so much fruit in there; we don’t have much room for anything else – which is not necessarily a bad thing. And since this summer has been so warm, we are starting to get all of the other summer produce in gardens and at farmer’s markets. Which of course means zucchini.

A friend had brought over some zucchini, and has made me swear to not spend any money on zucchini for the remainder of the summer. Where I am going with this is a combination of blueberries and zucchini. I love zucchini bread, and I believe that you can add almost anything to zucchini bread and have it taste great. So Blueberry Zucchini bread was born. Although it turns out that I am not the first person to come to this epiphany. I managed to find a recipe I like, tweak it, and add some blueberries for a bread that is good for dessert, but according to Joe, can count for breakfast as well.

Blueberry Zucchini Bread
Adapted from SmittenKitchen.com

3 eggs
1 cup olive or vegetable oil
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 cups grated zucchini
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
Pinch all spice
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
1 cup blueberries (or more if you want)

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Grease and flour two 8×4 inch loaf pans.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs with a whisk. Mix in oil and sugar, then zucchini and vanilla.

In a separate bowl, stir together flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, baking powder and salt, and nuts.

Combine the wet and dry ingredients until just mixed through, then add the blueberries and mix until just combined. Divide the batter into prepared pans.

Bake for 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. (I had to cover my loaves to stop them from browning too much before they finished cooking.)

Makes 2 loaves

For the Love of Leeks

I love leeks. Love. I even have a few planted in a garden box in my backyard, although I fear they will not turn into anything more than the spindly shoots of green they are currently. It’s been hard to find nice leeks in the places I have lived so far in my life. Here in Maine it has been easier, but they tend to be rather pricey. If they were less expensive I would put them in everything. But as is, I must restrain myself and use them sparingly and only when a truly great recipe calls for them.

There is of course potato leek soup – of which I make a pretty good version, but it is far too hot outside to mention the words ‘hot and hearty soup’ right now. And a leek tart is also subtle and delicious that more pieces of it then necessary are usually consumed on my part. But there is a recipe that uses as many leeks as you have, and satisfies that leek flavor craving without making you feel guilty about ingesting too much.

Usually, vegetable side dishes are always a little boring, I think. It’s hard to incorporate variety sometimes onto the plate for dinner. It’s easy to get stuck in the rut of meat, carb, veg and the only way to spruce it up is to change up the carb or add a sauce to the meat. Of course now that there are tons of vegetables begging to be picked from the ground and the farmer’s market, but even still it’s nice to add a little variety to cooking methods now and again.

This recipe is a great vegetable side dish, and is very easy and fairly healthy to make. As long as you like a little vinegar flavor, you will love this recipe. I know I just shared with you a German potato salad recipe that is heavy on the red wine vinegar –but this one, I promise, is not. It really lets the leeks and carrots shine and I think the whole thing tastes even better the next day for lunch.

Leeks and Carrots
as Adapted from Gourmet May 2008

This recipe can be multiplied easily. But this is just enough to make a side for 1 person. If you are making a larger batch, increase the cooking times as well. With the smaller, younger carrots, you won’t need to cook them that long at all.

1 medium leek (white and pale green parts only)
1 Tb unsalted butter
Salt and Pepper
3 medium carrots, cut diagonally into ¼ inch wide pieces
1/2 c water
2 Tb red-wine vinegar

Halve leeks lengthwise, rinse, and cut into ½ inch pieces

Sauté leeks in butter with a dash salt and pepper in a skillet over medium-high heat until softened, 3 to 4 minutes.

Stir in carrots, water, and vinegar. Cook, covered, over medium-high heat until carrots are tender, 12 to 18 minutes.

Boil, uncovered, until liquid has mostly evaporated, 1 to 2 minutes.

German Potato Salad

Since the title of this blog is German, I thought it would be nice if I shared another German recipe. Although, this one isn’t as authentic perhaps as others I will or have shared here. This is a Daggon family recipe. There were always a few German recipes that my mom would make for us throughout the year and this was always a favorite. You can make it all in one pot, and then keep it warm in the crock-pot all day, or you can put it in the fridge and eat it cold whenever the mood strikes you.

I have made this recipe before on several occasions, not to mention for dinner fairly regularly. It usually goes over well, as long as the diners like vinegar. The original recipe is from my grandmother’s 1968 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens “New” Cookbook, which I inherited after my grandmother passed away.

I love that cookbook. The pictures in it are startlingly unappetizing, but there is something about it that always makes me want to produce a jello mold or host the perfect bridge party. I like that all my standard questions regarding cooking can be answered easily in that book. How to bone a chicken, what table settings are appropriate for a dinner party, what fruit punch will dazzle your guests. The recipes are tested and true, and I find, are easily adaptable to today’s palate.

For the German Potato Salad, you can increase the quantity or decrease it to fit the number of servings you need. It doubles, or quadruples nicely – especially when you are bringing 40 pounds of it to a pot-luck for all the employees at the bakery you work in. The one-potted-ness of it works well too, when the thought of washing more dishes in your already full sink turns your stomach.

So even though the heat here this past week has made me want to eat nothing but ice cream for dinner, I managed to sweat through making this meal. And to be honest it doesn’t even take that long to pull together. You can always let the potatoes boil and leave the room to splash cold water on yourself. And the smell of bacon and onions can make you forget that your kitchen fan doesn’t work.

German Potato Salad
As adapted from the 1968 edition of Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook
And Jill Daggon

I used tri-color potatoes I had left over from making a patriotic potato salad for the 4th, but if you are using blue potatoes, be careful, as they do tend to fall apart more easily than their “stars and stripes” counterparts.

6 c. potatoes, cut into bite sized pieces
½ lb bacon, diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 lb kielbasa, sliced
2 Tb sugar
1 ½ tsp celery seed
1 tsp caraway seed
1 tsp salt
2 Tb flour
1 c. red wine vinegar
½ c. water
Pepper to taste

Boil the potatoes in salted water, until they are fork tender, about 15 minutes (depending on the size of your pieces). Then drain and run cold water over the potatoes to slow the cooking.

In the now empty potato pot, place diced bacon pieces and begin to render out the fat. When the bacon has rendered most of its fat, but before the pieces are crisp, add the onion and cook until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the sliced kielbasa, celery seed, caraway seed and salt and stir until everything is evenly coated. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly for about 5 minutes. You should have no more bacon grease on the bottom of your pot, if you do - add more flour. Once the flour has browned slightly, add the vinegar and water and stir vigorously to work in all the flour bits. Bring this mixture up to a boil to thicken, and simmer until the sauce will coat the back of a spoon.

Remove the pot from the heat, and add back in your potatoes, stirring to coat. Add salt and pepper as needed. Serve immediately, or let sit and refrigerate for later.

Sensational Scapes

Last year was the first time I had ever seen or heard of, for that matter, garlic scapes. I had made a pact with myself to buy and eat any new item at the farmer’s market that I had not tried before. So far, this has only proven to be beneficial to me. Well, last year I saw garlic scapes as one of the first items to be stocked once the market opened for the spring. Here in Maine, the growing season is a little slower than the rest of the country, so when the market opens in May, these little beauties are first to arrive, alongside radishes and baby greens.

Garlic scapes are the flowering stalk of a growing bulb of garlic. In these pictures you can see the light green bulbous part of the plant - that is where the flower will open if left to continue growing. If the flower does open, the garlic bulb will not continue to mature, and so the stem is neatly plucked off the plant after the top of it has curled. The exciting thing is though, that this piece is almost entirely edible. It can get a little woody towards the bottom of the stalk, but as far as I know, the blades of grass-like protrusions, stem, bulb and curl, are all edible.

The taste is like a vegetal raw garlic flavor, so a “green garlic’. It can be very pungent, as I recently learned after microwaving the leftover pasta and scape pesto at work today. But garlic never seems to bother me. I can’t smell it on other people or myself. Which may or may not be a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, I know if I have garlic breath, but I have never met anyone who seemed to exude garlic. In my mind, you can (almost) never eat too much garlic.

I use the 'almost' because I do believe that I once crossed that threshold. On a trip to San Francisco there was a garlic themed restaurant that my mother and I went to. It’s a little kitschy, but come on, who would say no to garlic scented Chardonnay? You mean you would say no to garlic Chardonnay? Hmmmm, perhaps I should have as well. But I am not one to pass up odd food/drink options. Without giving you all of the gory details, I realized I had crossed the garlic line, when that night, asleep, face down in the bed; I woke myself up from my own stinky burp. Yes that’s right a stinky burp woke me up. I’m a little ashamed, and admitting it here to you is a little frightening. At least I learned what my limits are when it comes to garlic.

This pesto is pretty strong, but can be cut with more cheese, olive oil and lemon juice if desired. I like the addition of lemon juice because you do need to take the biting edge off the raw garlic flavor. Feel free to toss this with pasta or spread on toast like bruschetta; just don’t pair it with garlic Chardonnay.

Garlic Scape Pesto
As seen in a myriad of recipes online

2 c garlic scape pieces, about ½” long (about ½ a pound)
1 c. grated Parmesan cheese
Juice of ½ a lemon
Salt and pepper to taste
Olive oil as needed

Combine garlic scapes, Parmesan, lemon juice salt and pepper in a food processor and pulse until combined. You may have to scrape down the sides to ensure that all the garlic scape pieces have met with the blades. Once the mixture has been chopped roughly, turn on the food processor and slowly drizzle in the olive oil, until a paste forms. You can make your pesto smoother, should you want to, with the addition of more olive oil.