Halved-Apple Crisp

What is the absolutely laziest way that you can make apple crisp?

Slice an apple in half and scoop out the core (I use a melon baller), cram dried cherries into the hollow, and press some crumb topping onto the cut surface of the apple. Bake on a sheet (or in a dish, to catch any juice), at 375℉ for about 25 minutes.

Dead easy (and almost terse enough to be a Twitter recipe)!

If you're one of those compulsively organized types, you can always make batches of the crumb topping and freeze them in small containers so that they're ready to go when you are. Me, I just had some leftover bits to use up. My freezer is too small to contemplate stocking such things with any regularity.

For the recipe for the crumb topping (and instructions for a more traditional apple crisp), check out my Apple Crisp post from last November.

Now that Spring is (theoretically) here, I'm loving the greater variety of fruit that has become available, but apples are available year round (at least in these parts), and this is a dish that you can have easily, anytime. For example, as breakfast. You've got your oats and your fruit, both classic breakfast components. Add a cup of coffee, and what more do you need? (Oh. Bacon, you say? Well, sure. Maybe on the weekend...)

International Bento (Japan): Gyoza-Meatball Bento!

What happens when you are making gyoza, and run out of wrappers before you run out of filling? Well, you could run out and buy more wrappers, certainly, or make up another batch by hand if that's the way you roll. However, if you only have a small amount of filling left over, why not just make meatballs?

To make sure they fit nicely into my rather flat bento, I shaped them more like tiny burger patties, and simply fried them up. So, I guess you could either call this "skinless gyoza" or flat meatballs. I "dressed" them with a little dollop of leftover tonkatsu sauce from a previous dinner, which was absolutely the right condiment (although spicy bean paste or miso gravy would have also been good). The filling I was making was pretty much the same as the pork filling, but I sometimes play fast and loose with the quantities of mushrooms and/or cabbage, which is why I ended up with a little extra this time. You can also substitute the ground pork for ground turkey, with tasty results, and one day I do intend to get around to trying a scallop-prawn gyoza.

Since gyoza filling is not cooked in advance of dumpling assembly, it's easy enough to shape any leftover bits into meatballs - you could freeze them uncooked, naturally, but I just cooked them up on the spot, downed one as a snack (just to make sure they were tasty, you understand) and packed up the rest for a lunch.

The rest of the bento is probably fairly self-explanatory: Radish lotus flowers (they look more like lotus flowers or lilies to me than roses, when cut this way), raw snow peas, and Japanese steamed rice with togaraschi shichimi sprinkled on top.

This was a fairly filling bento, between all the rice and four large meatballs, so it wasn't as balanced as it could have been. A little more veggie matter, or some fruit for dessert would have sorted that out nicely but, to be fair, I made this bento out of refrigerator scraps, essentially, so I was pretty pleased with it.

I'd like to get back into making more bentos. We've been eating out in restaurants a lot since the move, what with work schedules, hockey playoffs, and loads of new restaurants suddenly more available to us, so our leftovers haven't always been bento-friendly (or I've been too lazy to make them so). I do enjoy the way bento-making encourages the planning of a balanced lunch more than simply putting leftovers of a main dish into a container without thought or side dishes. It feels like a step in the right direction, and gets more fruit and vegetables into my lunchtime.

Takikomi Gohan

Another rice post - but rather different from risotto!

I've always enjoyed the small bowls of mixed rice, or takikomi gohan that one can get in Japanese restaurants - they provide a wonderful, warm, savory hit of satisfaction. The kind I tend to see around Vancouver are usually made with chicken, with mushroom, or with both, and I went for the combination, since it struck me as a fine idea for a casual supper at home.

I went looking online for suggestions regarding recipes, and there certainly is a number to choose from, each with a different approach to the necessary components. After a lot of searching, I finally came back to the incredibly useful Just Hungry food blog, the sister site of Just Bento. Her recipes are for straight-up mushroom (one traditional, one vegan), but she does mention the addition of diced chicken instead of bean curd, so that's the option I took. I thought I was getting the chicken pieces small enough, but next time I will dice them more finely.

The recipe itself is simplicity, if you are using a rice cooker. Chop your mushrooms (and chicken) and allow to marinate for an hour or so in a small amount of a mixture of roughly equal proportions of soy sauce, mirin, and sake. Add this mixture on top of the rice and water mixture in your rice cooker, then turn it on as usual for plain rice. Gently mix with a paddle when it is cooked, to integrate everything. Garnish as you please.

It is not a particularly elegant dish, as you can see below. It is simple, comforting, and easy fare, and one I intend to repeat again soon. The leftovers, as you can see above, made absolutely charming onigiri for a bento lunch the next day (and froze fairly nicely, too).

You can use whatever mushrooms you like. We used a combination of shiitake, king oyster, and enoki. Next time, I plan to include shimeji (beech mushroom), since I found that HMart carries the more widely cultivated bunashimeji. But really, any mushroom that you enjoy eating will work just fine.

I'm surprised it took me so long to try making this for myself, because it is very rewarding for the small amount of prep involved. Even if you've never had the restaurant version, you might want to give this a try: it is a solid entry in the grand category of soothing rice-with-bits dishes.

Lemon Risotto

I make a very lemony risotto.

Oh. Hello, there. Is it the end of March already? I'd ask where the time has gone, except that I know (all too well): I've been moving. My last few weeks especially have been a haze of restaurant meals, often at odd hours, and foraged food that is less cooked than it is assembled. We're all moved in, now, which is to say that there are boxes everywhere and loads to do, but the kitchen is up and running (thank goodness!) and I hope to be back to more frequent posting now.

But back to the matter at hand. Risotto! Specifically, a deeply yellow, unabashedly lemony risotto that is neither sour nor acidic, but has wonderful lemon flavour that is dialed all the way up to eleven. A little goes a long way, but even a small serving of Lemon Risotto makes a meal feel like a special occasion.

The trick to all this lemony bounty without the pain and suffering is the sneaky third ingredient in the recipe, that is, preserved lemon. Now, I'm sure there are shop-bought preserved lemons that you can buy, and frankly I don't know whether or not they would do the trick here (perhaps they would serve quite nicely), but I can tell you that making your own preserved lemon is both astonishingly easy and very rewarding. For one thing, it keeps for a surprisingly long time (tightly bottled in the fridge), and you only need a little tiny bit of it to get huge flavour. Essentially, preserving the lemon means that you get all of the intense flavour of the zest, without the bitterness of the pith. The lemon simply becomes a wobbly translucent mass - chutney textured if, like me, you wholly quarter your lemons and then slice them, as opposed to leaving them connected at the base in quarters. The clean, sliced lemons are tossed with kosher salt and the spices of your choice (I like to put a bare pinch of turmeric in there, to enhance the colour), packed into a jar and completely covered with freshly squeezed lemon juice. There's a quick version here, which has a very basic, clean flavour profile, but you can also google your way through Nimbu Achar recipes to get something more interestingly flavoured.

This risotto really has a triple lemon threat: the preserved lemon, yes, but also the zest and juice of a fresh lemon. With all that lemon going on, what do you pair it with? In restaurants, it can sometimes be found as a bed for seared scallops or prawns, which is a fine idea. Or, as seen above, it makes a beautiful plate partner with roasted chicken and braised fennel. But, right at the moment, asparagus is in season, and that's my go-to favourite. Anything that could benefit from a lemony kick, really.

The link provides a pretty comprehensive recipe for the risotto, but a couple of extra notes: take your time, when you're making risotto. You don't have to stir it for every single second, while it cooks, but almost! It pays to have all of your prep done ahead, and any other dishes you plan to serve mapped out.

Give a really lemony risotto a try. It's a great way to celebrate Spring.

Pizza Bianca

Oh, how I do love my pizza. We have it at least once a month, sometimes more, and we always make it from scratch. Palle is especially fond of non-tomato sauced pizzas, although he's generally pretty happy with any homemade pizza, including old faithful - pepperoni and mushroom with a classic, oregano-laden sauce. In the interests of keeping our pizza consumption from being monotonous, I like to try new things, from time to time. A recent effort involved miso gravy for the sauce, and shabu-shabu thin cut beef dressed with sesame oil and soy sauce. It went over rather well, and I'll certainly be keeping that in mind the next time I have leftover miso gravy lurking in the fridge.

But this one really wowed me. It's not even a recipe (excepting the crust, which is my usual recipe (expired link removed, please see comments below for recipe) using a three-hour rise and a fraction of the yeast) I was particularly pleased to be able to make it entirely out of things that I already had on hand, repurposing leftover roasted chicken and roasted fennel from the previous night's lemon risotto dinner, and using up the tail end of bocconcini which we had after making Messy Giuseppes (Palle's rather Italianate Sloppy Joes). Even the parsley was leftover from garnishing the risotto!

I chopped up the fennel, which had been roasted in thick wedges. I used the tenderest bits of fennel and scattered them over the crust - no sauce, I simply depended upon the olive oil that had been used to roast the fennel to get the party started. Next, meat from the roasted thighs and legs and back of the roast chicken. I generally pull the meat off the bones after dinner, while it is still warm, and plate it up for easy use later, and so it certainly stood me in good stead here. I chopped up the larger pieces, and tore some with my fingers, to get nice distribution. Finally, I dotted the small amount of bocconcini around the perimeter, sprinkled the whole thing with the already-chopped parsley, and bashed it into the oven until the crust started to turn gold. Once out of the oven, we grated some long strands of parmesan over it, and watched them melt artistically onto the pizza.

This was really a triumph of keeping things simple, too. I resisted the urge to add peppers or mushrooms or anything else, didn't overload on the cheese, and ended up with a very satisfying pizza that was very different from the taco pizza, vegetarian pizzas, or buffalo-wing pizzas that I've shared before.

There's a lot more things I want to try, pizza-wise, but for the record, I have no objection to any particular style of pizza. I like thick crust, thin crust, wood-fired, grilled, red-sauced, mustard-sauced, no-sauce at all. Best of all, I like my pizzas homemade.

Sunshine Orecchiette

For some reason, I always want to mis-spell orecchiette. It's either orrechiette, orecchietti, or worse - orrechiete. All wrong. This dish, however, is very, very right.

It came to me as I was pondering a use for the leftover half-pound (or so) of orecchiette left over from testing a recipe for a book review. While I was originally thinking that it would be a meatless dish, I was reminded that we had a double-smoked farmer's sausage in the freezer that needed using, so I threw that in, too. I was very happy with the combination of chickpeas and sausage and pasta all together, but you could easily make this dish vegetarian (vegan, in fact) by using veggie stock in place of the chicken stock, and simply omitting the sausage.

I wanted something non-tomatoey, and we weren't all that keen on a cream sauce that particular night, so I decided to make a bright, lemony sauce, using the tips and tricks I'd learned in tweaking the Chicken Sahara recipe. With the first few bites, we knew this one was a winner.

Sunshine Orecchiette

Serves: 4
Total Prep & Cooking Time: 30 - 45 minutes

200 grams orecchiette
1 double-smoked farmer's sausage
2 cups canned chick peas
2 cloves garlic, crushed
Zest & juice of a lemon
2 tablespoons unbleached flour
1 teaspoon chicken stock/veggie broth (unheated)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
¼ teaspoon smoked paprika
½ teaspoon turmeric
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
4 cups spinach, in chiffonnade

Dice sausage and fry gently in a 12" skillet until lightly browned. Obviously, vegetarians can skip ahead to the next step.

Combine flour, salt & spices in a large measuring cup or small bowl. Whisk the cold stock or broth into the flour mixture, along with the lemon zest and juice and crushed garlic. Do not use heated stock/broth, or you will get lumps; room temperature or cold is best. Whisk until the mixture is smooth with flecks of garlic. Pour the sauce mixture into the skillet, and cook, stirring often over medium heat for 15 minutes. Add the chickpeas and continue to cook on low, covered so the liquid doesn't all evaporate. The sauce will get much yellower as it cooks, don't worry.

Bring a pot of water to a boil and cook orecchiette to desired doneness. Drain (or - better - remove pasta from the pot with a spider tool, and add to the sauce. Stir really well, getting the sunny yellow colour to coat the pasta. If the dish seems too thick or stiff, add a little of the pasta cooking water to thin it out (maybe a quarter of a cup). Allow everything to cook for a few minutes on very low while you slice the spinach into chiffonade. Stir spinach ribbons into the pasta, combining well, and serve immediately (with a little freshly ground black pepper, if you fancy).

Hamburger Stroganoff Skillet Dinner

First things first: this is, obviously, not a true stroganoff, nor is it pretending to be one. Instead, it's a quick weeknight dinner that only uses one pan and doesn't take a whole lot of time. Bonus points that it is made from ingredients that I'm likely to have on hand. Even better, it has a surprisingly modest caloric payload, which (according to an online recipe calculator) is approximately 400 calories per serving, somewhere in the vicinity of 1 1/2 to 2 cups. Add some fresh steamed veggies for a side dish, and you're licking the plate (and patting your satisfied belly) for under 500 calories. This dish is, I presume, what Hamburger Helper wants to be. Only better, I think, and with less sodium, which means it doesn't send you desperately, repeatedly to your water glass until your insides slosh when you walk. Comfort food!

Hamburger Stroganoff Skillet Dinner

Serves 4

450 grams extra lean ground beef
1/4 teaspoon Kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
1 cup finely diced onions
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
200 g broad/wide egg noodles
1 1/2 teaspoons Better than Bouillon Beef Base (or substitute beef broth for the boiling water below)
3/4 cup plain Greek yogurt (I use Liberte's 0% fat)
2 cups sliced mushrooms of your choice
2 tablespoons unbleached flour
1 1/2 cups boiling water
1/2 cup cold water
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 tsp cornstarch

In a 12" non-stick skillet, fry the beef, stirring occasionally until well browned. Sprinkle the dry mustard and the salt over the meat and stir again. Add the onions and garlic, cooking and stirring until softened and a bit translucent. Add mushrooms to skillet, and a splash of water to make sure nothing sticks. Add the noodles, beef base, Worcestershire sauce, and boiling water, stir well and bring to a simmer. Shake the half cup of cold water in a lidded container with the flour, until smooth. Add to the skillet and stir well until thoroughly incorporated and gravy starts to thicken up, and then cook over medium heat until noodles are half-done (about 5 minutes). Combine yogurt with cornstarch (so it doesn't break and curdle) in a small bowl and beat with a spoon or whisk until perfectly smooth. Add yogurt mixture to skillet. Cook stirring until mixture thickens to a creamy coating and the noodles are fully cooked.

A crisp salad would be another lovely way to round this out.

Orange & Date Flecked Muffins

These are homely little muffins, but pack a fresh, orangey punch, thanks to using the whole orange - skin, pith, and all. They're not too sweet, either, so it doesn't feel like you're eating a cupcake (or one of those lethal coffeeshop-style gut-bomb muffins).

You do need a blender (or a good food processor), because chopping through both dates and orange peels is tough work.

Orange & Date Flecked Muffins
Adapted from allrecipes.com

1 orange (thin skinned is best)
3/4 cup 1% buttermilk
1/2 cup diced dates
1/4 cup butter
1 large egg
1 3/4 cups unbleached flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon Kosher Salt
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

Preheat oven to 400 F degrees.

Grease a 12-cup regular sized muffin tin (or spritz with canola spray).

Cut orange into eight pieces, and remove any seeds, as well as the thick strip of pith from the centre of the orange. Put the orange pieces into the blender with the egg, buttermilk, dates and butter. Blend thoroughly until mixture is thick, fairly smooth with flecks. It will look a bit like baby food.

In a separate bowl, stir together flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cloves and ginger. Make a well in the flour mixture and pour the contents of the blender in all at once. Stir rapidly with a fork until any dry bits are gone. Don't worry about small lumps, though, the batter doesn't need to be smooth. Divide the batter between muffin cups.

Bake in preheated oven for about 20 minutes. Let stand in pan for five minutes, then remove to wire racks for cooling.

Store cooled muffins in a sealable container in the fridge to keep them fresh. You can also wrap them individually in plastic and freeze. Reheating a muffin for 15 seconds in the microwave works beautifully, and makes them taste oven-fresh.

Perfect for coffee breaks!

The Last Pie of the Year is also the First Pie of the Year

Which can only mean one thing: Tourtière for New Year’s Eve (and again, New Year’s Day). (It's also often made for Christmas Eve, instead, depending on where you hail from.)

Tourtière is one of those wonderful foods which can be summed up as “those Quebecois pork pies” (doing it something of a disservice in brevity), but also holds an awful lot of holiday tradition, and hot debates as to the exact ingredients required (or, in some cases, permitted). There is the great potato debate - should it be included at all, should it be in chunks, or should it be mashed smooth? There is the meat debate - all pork, a mixture of pork and beef (and the percentages thereof), should you use game, such as venison or rabbit? And finally, last but not least, the seasoning. I’ve seen arguments for salt-and-pepper only (boring, but safe, I suppose), nutmeg and cloves (my personal favourite), and a sort of kitchen sink approach which encompasses every possible option from the spice rack, and infinite variations in between.

I am not Quebecois (although part French), and therefore do not have a family imperative to include in my definition of this dish, but I have a great fondness for French food in general, including its many regional variations. Here is an ad-hoc version that should prove tasty to most meat-pie loving folks:

Dawna’s Tourtière

Serves 6 - 8
Total Preparation & Cooking Time: 1.5 to 2 hours

Pastry for one double crust pie
2 cups flour
½ cup butter, cold
Pinch of salt
5 tablespoons cold water

Using a food processor fitted with a metal blade, blend the flour, butter and salt with quick, full-speed pulses until the butter is the size of little peas and evenly distributed throughout the flour. With the motor running on low, add the water all at once through the top of the food processor. Immediately crank the speed up on the processor, and in a few seconds it should start to become dough, little chunks of which start to glomb together and try to crawl up out of the bowl. Pull the dough clump(s) out onto a lightly floured counter, and knead just barely until it comes together. Separate into two roughly equal pieces, and pat down into disks. You’re done! You can refrigerate them until you are ready to work with them, or you can roll out the pastry now if your filling is ready. This pastry works beautifully for sweet or savory pies and tarts.

Filling

600 grams lean ground pork
300 grams extra lean ground beef
1 medium onion, minced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 bayleaf
1 medium potato, boiled and mashed (as smooth or lumpy as you wish)
½ teaspoon salt
Good pinch of ground nutmeg
Good pinch of ground cloves
Small pinch ground sage
Small pinch ground thyme
Black pepper to taste (lots)
½ cup vegetable broth

Brown the pork and the beef in a large skillet. Add the onion, garlic, and bayleaf and stir and saute until the onion becomes translucent and tender. Stir in: first the seasonings, then the broth, and finally the potato. Stir about, and taste. Adjust the seasonings to your liking, remove the bayleaf, and remove the filling from the heat.

Roll out your pie’s bottom crust and place it in the pie plate. Heap up the filling in the middle, and then spread it about so that the pie will be full, without gaps by the side crust. Sprinkle the filling with extra nutmeg, and lay the top crust over the filling. Trim and crimp the sides, and cut slits (air vents) in the top of the pie, and brush it with an egg wash (essentially, one egg, beaten smooth, applied with a pastry brush until the whole top surface, including crenellations, are liberally coated with yellow goo. This only uses up about a tablespoon, at the most, of your beaten egg, so put the rest in the fridge (in a little dish, covered well) for a future omelette or other baking tasks).

Place pie in a 450 F oven for 10 to 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 F and continue to cook for another 20 to 30, depending on your oven.

Allow to cool for about five or ten minutes before slicing, to help it preserve its shape when cut.

You may wish to serve this with a nice tomato chutney, or banana ketchup, or even salsa. I won’t judge - well, not much, anyway.

Happy New Year!

International Bento (Afghanistan): Burani Bonjon

I realize that I have not yet posted any of the holiday baking or cooking that we have done this past month, and I'm not going to get to it again, either. I confess to be a little weary of butter tarts, shortbread, and cranberry oat squares at this point, and I'm right back to craving the savory foods that we tend to rely upon.

This bento was constructed from leftovers from a dinner that Palle cooked earlier this month, and we're definitely going to have it again. The lamb curry in almond milk (a sort of Afghani korma, if you will) was tasty but a tad monotone, and may want a little tweaking, before I'm ready to post it up. The eggplant dish, however, Burani Bonjon, was outstanding. Outstanding! Here it is again below, as we had it the first night, since I fairly drowned it in yoghurt sauce in the bento picture.


One of the marvelous things about this dish is that it is served at room temperature, or chilled, meaning that it a) can be made in advance, and b) is perfect for bento (although, I did remove the lamb curry from the bento to warm it up anyway). The other marvelous thing is that, while consisting wholly of familiar flavours, the combination was so delicious that I really could not get it into my mouth fast enough.

Burani Bonjon
Serves 4

1 large eggplant (about 8" long)
200 ml. canned diced tomatoes, drained
4 garlic cloves, crushed
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon powdered cayenne
salt & pepper to taste
Aleppo pepper (for garnish)
Seer Moss (for garnish, see recipe below)

Slice the eggplant into coins. Lightly, but liberally salt both sides and allow to rest on a cooling rack over a cookie sheet for about an hour, to draw out the bitterness. Rinse the salt off, and pat the slices very dry.

Saute the crushed garlic in half the olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed skillet until fragrant, the remove the garlic to the side. Add the (dried) eggplant slices to the skillet and brown both sides, cooking in batches if necessary, and adding the remaining oil as needed (eggplant soaks up oil pretty fast).

Reduce the heat and add the tomato, garlic, turmeric, cayenne, salt and pepper. Simmer until the eggplant is very tender. Serve warm, or at room temperature (not hot!). Drizzle with Seer Moss and sprinkle with chopped cilantro and Aleppo pepper.

Seer Moss: Garlic Yoghurt Sauce

This makes a lot of sauce, but you will love it as a vegetable dip, or as an alternative to Tzatziki, so make the whole batch.

1 cup plain yoghurt
3 - 4 cloves crushed garlic
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons minced fresh mint
2 tablespoons olive oil
pinch salt

Combine and let chill for at least an hour to allow the flavours to meld, but remove from fridge 15 minutes before serving, to take the chill off.

I can't wait to have this again.