Ms. Kiwi Meets Roasted Peppers

The next great adventure of Ms. Kiwi involves roasted red peppers (see the colorful multitasking in the photo above) and stewed tomatoes, all slow-cooked and whizzed into submission before submitting to my stomach.

On the side, a little peppery salami and a feta-parsley pesto with green garlic over homemade flatbread. And Virgil's cream soda, of course.

Tahoe Cassoulet

Ever since Ms. Kiwi showed up, I've had a hankering for trying my hand at big-"C" Cassoulet. You know, that daunting (for cook and consumer) French dish of, essentially, layers upon layers of fat 'n beans.

As you may or may not know, I am not one for following recipes, so after prowling around the Internet for a few minutes, I convinced myself that I'd make something up when we went to Tahoe. I'm not a skier or snowboarder, and I had a whole ham hock just waiting to roll in the hay with some beans and then feed a gaggle of hungry riders.

Here's what went down:

- Midnight, Thursday: Soak a lot of Navy beans.

- 11am, Friday: Rinse beans. Put them in Ms. Kiwi with ham hock, onion skins, garlic skins, celery and carrot butts, sprigs of rosemary, thyme, bay leaf. Heat slowly. Cut up into small bits a stale old hunk of baguette you have lying around. Stick it into the oven at a low temperature that sounds right, and peek in on it every now and then. When the bits are crunchy, take them out.

- 2pm: Extract everything from gorgeous stock. Reduce stock and carefully separate beans and delicious ham pieces from the other crap.

- 3pm: Render fat from some bacon. Brown some mild Italian sausage in it. Remove meat. Throw in whole buncha chopped onion, celery, carrot and let it brown around in the fat in the pan.

- 3:30pm: Add some spoonfuls of tomato paste. Add some more if you want. Brown around. Then dump in a can of diced tomatoes. Meanwhile, hack the end off a whole head of garlic, lop a tablespoon or two of butter on it and wrap in foil. Put in oven at a temperature between 250 and 400 for a while, until it starts smelling good and you check it and it is nicely browned and squishy. Then take it out and just let it sit by itself on the side.

- 4pm: Hurry and add beans! Then meat! Then reduced stock! Riders are coming back and want to go drink!

- 5pm: Go drink multiple pitchers of beer while your stewing pot of kind-of-fat and beans and vegetables slowly does its thing for a while.

- 8pm: Return to glorious stewy pot of kind-of-fat-but-not-really and beans and vegetables smelling to-die-for. Let riders ooh and ahh over glorious smell of your day-of-slaving. Squish smooshy bits of garlic out of wrappy bits into a pan with the melted butter sloshing all around its sides. Get this warm, then add your homemade breadcrumbs and a little flourish of a handful of parsley, and toast them up.

- 8:10pm: Bat the hungry riders away from Ms. Kiwi with a spatula. Dump buttery-garlicky breadcrumbs all over top of hot stewy beany mixture, and stick Ms. Kiwi into a hot oven somewhere around 400-450 degrees.

- 8:30pm: Carefully pull Ms. Kiwi out of oven and put on table in front of drooling riders. Serve them a gigantic ladle-full with plenty of breadcrumby bits on top, and let them help themselves to various dark and moody red wines.

- 9:30pm: Scrape Ms. Kiwi clean with spoons or tongues, follow up with ice cream cones if possible and a quick session in the jacuzzi.

Kiwi Creuset!

There she is! Isn't she gorgeous? Isn't she lovely? I couldn't resist this picture with all the complimentary greenery.

Didn't have time straight away for cassoulet or osso buco, but a couple pounds of mussels with fennel, leeks, thyme, oregano, feta and parsley will do just fine. She's just so BIG! 6.75 quarts makes two pounds of mussels look like a mini meal.

I tried homemade frites, too, but those damn things never come out right. I soaked for an hour then rinsed and patted very dry, to no avail. All soft 'n sticky. Help?

Perfecting Parsley Pesto Pasta

I adore alliteration, even if I'm told to use less of it in my writing. I can do what I want here! So it is: Perfecting Parsley Pesto Pasta.

Saveur is having a big home cook contest for the best pasta recipe, and I really, really want that Sur La Table gift certificate!! I will show you all the neat things I get if I win.

The contest runs through the month of March, so I was looking to do something seasonal and simple but also stunning (s, s, s, s). The solution is parsley pesto, because there's always entirely too much parsley in one bunch for anything other than pummeling that stuff into submission (and pesto).

Here was a first go, paired with spaghetti and asparagus, because that's in season in March, too... at least in my part of the world. If not yours, hopefully you'll see the light of day--I mean, spring--soon.

I also got to use my new mortar and pestle to pestle-ize the pesto, which was positively thrilling!

Twitter Stew

That is what I shall always call this meal: Twitter Stew. I am just learning about Twitter. It is somewhat scary. I have to face that, despite my job as a writer and my Communication degree, I am falling into a generational divide, slightly unable to keep up with internet trends, and I'm just 27 years old. JUST. To the tiny twittering tweens, that's OLD.

Back to the point: I found this recipe on Twitter from @amandahesser, who for some reason or another was posting recipes involving citrus and olives. It was cold and rainy (and continues to be) here in my new home of SF, so a lamb stew with pre-cut butternut squash that I had sitting in my fridge, along with those ingredients, sounded spot-on perfect.

The whole delicious thing took 10 minutes to prepare, then cooked for 30 more, and I'd barely finished catching up with my friend Janelle, who was over for dinner, before dinner was ready. Then, we paired it with an awesome little find from Bi-Rite's frankly very impressive wine selection: 2008 Musar Jeune--a fresh, unoaked red from the culty Chateau Musar made of Cab, Cinsault and Carignan grown on limestone soils. Hearts and stars, and all that.

We don't really have furniture in our new home, just flowery plates and rugs borrowed from the 'rents, so there we are on the floor. See? Moving is fun! SEE??!

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Note: This MAY soon appear on a new and exciting blog called SameBrightStar Cooks! If my East Coast partner in crime gets on it and cooks this sucker up on Sunday. Here's hoping!

Chic Cheap Lunch

We've been eating pasta while we get settled in SF and wait for jobs to start and paychecks to come. LOTS of pasta. But pasta for lunch and pasta for dinner gets a little too pasta for me, so I was forced to become creative, which quite logically led me to bread, which is similarly cheap and comforting and capable of mixing with many ingredients.

We did not have many of those, either, so I rounded up everything in the fridge: the remains of a can of cannellini beans, some leftover sprigs of basil and the butt of a lemon, all of which I fork-mashed (blender?! food processor?! you're kidding, right??) into a frankly very delicious spread for bread. Spread for bread. Rhyme!

We splurged on a peppery cacciatore salami and some blood oranges--MY FAVORITE CITRUS EVER--paired it with Mexican Coke in a glass bottle and called it lunch. Pas mal, eh?

As a side note, this is Napoleon on his new bed after a long play at the greatest dog park ever.

The Temp Apartment Challenge: 2 Pots + a Cookie Sheet

The view from our temporary perch in sunny San Francisco is lovely: blue sky, green hills, clean streets and a Whole Foods 30 seconds away.

We are happy! But alas, the state of my cooking is not. While we look for our permanent home, our temporary one is equipped with two pots and a cookie sheet and not a whole lot else. How to gourmet dinner-ize????

It could be a new chef-challenge show on Food Network! Here's what we made last night with just two pots and a cookie sheet:

Pot 1: Battuta di pollo. A thinly pounded (utilizing pot 2, pre-salad) chicken breast sautéed in butter--LOTS of butter to prevent sticking.

Pot 2: Insalata di arugula, tomato, cannellini and shallot with the coup de grace... bergamot vinaigrette! We found this little delicacy at the incredible Bi-Rite market, where I hope to eventually live immediately across from, and we squeezed it all into our little salad "bowl" (aka pot 2) along with olive oil, salt and pepper. We also took the excess bergamot juice and added it to the little crispy chicken bits and butter left in pot 1 to make a tangy reduction. Delicious. Me smart.

Cookie sheet: Roasted potatoes with olive oil and **foraged** rosemary--it's growing out in the little tree-box thing in the middle of the sidewalk next door!! Shh. Don't tell I snatched some. I felt sooo hippie-like and cool with my foraging effort.

Bonus points for this being A) super-affordable and B) well-paired with the neat little lighter-bodied, fresh and rosy 2008 Julien Sunier Fleurie we picked up.