chorizo carbonara

Can I get real for a minute? I am drunk. Pissed. Three sheets to the wind. Left of right. Don't know Tuesday from purple. BUT THAT DON'T BOTHER NONE! This is by far the most impressive meal you can make with the most limited of memory and motor skills. Chorizo Carbonara. If there is a better meal I've never had it.


1/2 pound fresh pasta (I mean made today by you fresh, check our recipe you slacker)
2 egg yolks
12 oz Mexican pork chorizo
1/2 cup heavy wipping cream
Hard cheese for topping
Salt and pepper


This may be the perfect date meal, I'm just saying. From making the noodles to mixing the ingredients, its cheap, easy, and completely fool proof. Make your noodles and let them rest a half hour. Be sure to leave the eggs and cream on the counter, cold eggs and cream will not do. Room temperature is ideal. While they are resting, cook the chorizo in a skillet over medium heat. You want it to get a nice crispy texture. Drain the fat as needed. While the chorizo is crisping, bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Once at a rolling boil pull the heat back to a light boil and toss the pasta in. Because you are using fresh pasta (DONT YOU DARE USE DRY SO HELP ME GOD I WILL FIND AND END YOU!) it will cook in under four minutes. Taste every 30 seconds to ensure proper doneness. While the pasta is cooking whisk the egg yolks and cream until just combined, be careful not to over-do it. Drain pasta and remove from heat. Toss pasta, eggs, cream, and chorizo until a sauce forms. If the pasta is too hot the eggs and cream will curdle and be awful. So. You know. DON'T do that. Plate and top with very thin slices of hard cheese and a few cracks of good fresh pepper. You're welcome.

Garlic Scapes Pesto

This weekend I picked up these odd, snake-like greens at the farmer's market here in Davis with absolutely no idea what I was going to do with them. After a quick Google search for "Garlic Scapes" I learned that they are the curly shoots of the garlic plant that have a more mild garlic taste. After tasting a piece raw I would say its about 1/4 the strength of regular garlic, if you would like to try using it as a substitution. It looked like pesto was the most popular recipe. I decided to try my hand at one. All of the ingredients listed below are close approximations at best. Pesto requires a light hand and frequent tastings to get right.

1 bunch garlic scapes
1/4 cup pine nuts
1/3 cup hard cheese grated
1/2 cup olive oil
5 basil leaves
salt and pepper


I started by loosely chopping the scapes. When chopping basil for a pesto I usually go for speed over uniformity because the blender does a solid job of sorting out the details. In this particular case, however, the scapes are very fiberous. You need to cut them down to at least a quarter inch, ideally smaller, or else you will have long fibers in the pesto and that can get stuck in your teeth and be miserable.

You can chop the pine nuts at this point if you prefer your pesto more smooth, I personally don't.
Add 3/4ths of the scapes and oil into the blender and pulse until it reaches your prefered texture. Add the cheese, basil, pine nuts, salt and pepper, reserving about a quarter of each for fine tuning. Pulse for three seconds to combine, then taste. Tastes too much like garlic? Add more basil. Too nutty? Add more scapes, salt and pepper. Too sweet? add more pine nuts. Tune the pesto to yours and your guests' tastes.

We served this spread on toasted bread slices and it was lovely. I  could also see it working very well as a base for a simple pasta sauce or even adding something unexpected to a salsa. Enjoy!

Farmers Market 5/12/2012

Davis' Farmer's Market was stellar as usual today. I am super excited about the young spring garlic and the garlic scrapes. I've never cooked with either so should be fun. The scrapes will end up in a pesto and the garlic is going into a gnocchi.

Photos

I thought I should put a picture of myself up here at some point so here is me making salsa.

I tossed in a picture of Shannon discovering that Coppola Sparkling Wine in a can is actually pretty damn good. 

Flank Steak and Herbs Salad

This was just too good not to share. We usually change things in the recipes and add our own tips and learnings, but this recipe is dead simple and tastes fantastic. No point in trying to improve on it, so here is a link to the site and a photo of our results.

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/05/thai-style-marinated-flank-steak-and-herb-sal.html

Cold Sesame Noodles

Adapted from Susanna Foo Chinese Cuisine

This is our favorite cold noodle salad. Its fantastic on warm summer days when you have a ton of vegetables you want to use up but don't want to fire up the wok. We used dried Chinese noodles, but pretty much any noodle will work. most of the steps can be completed ahead of time and then combined a few minutes before serving. While the flavors blend really well over-night, the veggies have a tendency to get very limp very quickly. The dressing is also works as a great salad dressing if you have left-overs.


 olive oil
1 pound noodles
2 garlic cloves minced
1/2 sesame paste
1/3 cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon tabasco sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
1/3 cup chicken stock
1/4 chunky peanut butter
4 endives
1/2 cucumber
1/2 bell pepper
1/4 cup minced cilantro
1/4 cup toasted sesame seeds



Cook the noodles until tender according to the instructions on the packaging. Strain the noddles, toss with 1 tablespoon of oil and lay them out flat on a cooking sheet until cool. You can cover them with plastic wrap and refrigerate if you want to do this step ahead.  

Saute the garlic in 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large skillet over medium high heat until fragrant. Remove from heat and add sesame paste, peanut butter, soy sauce, vinegar, tabasco and sugar. It will develop into a thick paste pretty quickly, all you are doing here is making sure everything is mixed well. Bring the chicken stock to a boil in a separate pot then add that to the paste, creating a the dressing.

Cut the bottoms of the endives, remove the leaves, and julienne them. Endives are a bit tricky because they are so crisp you risk snapping the leaves if you do not cut off a bit more of the bottom after every layer of leaves. Its hard to describe but you will see once you get going. Julienne the cucumber and the bell pepper as well.

The book suggests to toss the sauce with the noodles and then top with the vegetables and cilantro. This is great for presentation and will store much better than if you toss everything together, but if you are serving a larger group, like a pot luck, you will definitely want to toss it all together. Enjoy!

Orecchiette

I usually keep away from making shaped pasta, if only because I love using my pasta maker to cut. We recently discovered orecciette, (little ears in Italian, apparently) an easy to make and easier to form pasta. Give it a try, its a great break from spaghetti.



Adapted from http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Fresh-Semolina-Orecchiette-10610

1 cups semolina (fancy Italian flour, you can just double the regular flower if you want)
1 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup lukewarm water

In a large bowl stir together semolina and flour and form a well in center. Add water and a generous pinch of salt to well and with a fork gradually incorporated semolina mixture until a dough is formed (some of the mixture will not be incorporated). Knead adding flower until the dough is smooth. I had about a quarter cup of flower left over. Divide dough into 4 pieces and wrap separately in plastic wrap. Let rest at room temp for up to an hour.


Remove plastic wrap from 1 piece of dough and roll between you hands to create a rope 1/2 inch wide. Mine came out to be around 10-12 inches.

Put rope on a work surface and with a sharp knife cut into 1/2-inch pieces, separating pieces as cut so they are no longer touching. Put each cut piece of dough, a cut side down, in palm of hand and form a depression by pressing thumb of other hand into dough and twisting slightly. Toss the little ears into the bowl with the remaining flower.

Cook in a boiling pot of salted water for 8-12 minutes, until cooked through. We had these with broccoli rabe and olive oil, and it was wonderful, even if it wasn't very photogenic.