An Italian Take on Mexican Food (updated, with more pics)

...wherein I pay homage to my two favorite types of cuisine.

The above picture was taken waaaaay back (relatively speaking) in the 2008-2009 era of my life, back in the apartment north of Greenlake when I was living with Laurel. It's Mexican Lasagna! I used Pastor Ryan's recipe from the Pioneer Woman's website as the base concept, and changed it a little to suit my needs (mostly so that it would fit in my very-short-and-not-really-meant-for-huge-casseroles glass 9x13 pan).

I've made this dish a total of 3 times now, for various ravaging crowds, with great success and feedback. The first time, it was just me and my friend Dion. Despite the fact that the recipe was shrunken by about 1/3, and the fact that we each had at least 2 huge servings that night, there were still enough leftovers to last me a week's worth of meals.

Danksauce.

The second time was for band practice at my friend Scot's house, which is full of stoney male musicians. I hazily (through the erm...beer) remember it taking a REALLY LONG TIME to prep all the ingredients. We snacked our way through a few bags of chips and a big bowl of pico de gallo during the 1-2 hrs between me arriving with my bags of groceries and the "lasagna" coming out of the oven.

And the last time I made it, I got all fancy (with the food, not with the picture-taking, clearly) and garnished it with sliced avocados and olives and cilantro. As you can see, I was smart about it that time and split it into two pans, which allowed for more mouths to be fed.

Lately, I've been inspired by the concept of taking the regional tastes (vegetables, seasonings, cheeses, bread products) of one geographic area and applying them to a regional dish/concept of a dish of a different geographical area. It's worked out pretty well so far.

For example: a week or two ago, we (mah luvuh and I) made geek nachos. We substituted pita chips for tortilla chips, feta & chevre for cheddar, and added diced red onion, diced fennel bulb, sundried & fresh tomatoes, and olives.

It ended up a little dry, and neither the feta nor the chevre (Bee-tee-dubs, I'm totally aware that chevre is French, not Greek. But if we want to get technical, cheddar is originally English, so clearly, we don't want to get technical because that would entail questioning one of the best combinations of cheese and crunchy corn products ever.)--

*inhale*

*exhale*

Right...so, anyway, the chevre and feta didn't get all melty-stretchy like cheddar does (which I should have predicted), and the whole thing ended up kind of dry, and didn't really hold together at all. If I were to try it again, I'd use some mozz or some other kind of melty cheese in addition to the feta, and I might toss the chips in some olive oil before adding everything on top.

And then, last night...

(insert photo of delectable food here)

...I made Mexican pizza. The idea was born out of my desire to try out my recently-acquired pizza stone (which is actually just being lent to me by my parents) and my desire to use up some of the large amount of leftover enchilada sauce in the fridge.

Disclaimer: The gods of sangria and hunger kept me from remembering to take a picture of the pizza I made (and the amazing pre-packaged sliced chorizo I found at Trader Joe's), but it's definitely something I'm going to make (and probably rework a bit) in the future, so there will be a photo! Eventually!

Anywho, as you can probably imagine, I used the basic concept of pizza (thin-ish round of dough, topped with some kind of sauce, then cheese, then meat and veggies and maybe herbs), and just substituted the typical Italian or Americanized-Italian ingredients with Mexican/Spanish/Americanized-Mexican ones. For last night's rendition, that meant enchilada sauce as a base, then jalepeno-jack and mozz (for strechy-/melty-ness) cheeses, sliced chorizo and Spanish salami, sliced red onions, and then topped with fresh diced tomatoes and cilantro once it was out of the oven.

It was heavenly. Granted, the crust was a bit thicker than I would've liked, which led to me piling on copious amounts of everything to balance out the bread-to-topping ratio. Next time, I'll do a thinner crust and less toppings, so the flavors aren't vying for attention and overwhelming any unsuspecting mouths.

Srsly.

(photo: Kenji of Serious Eats)

I NEED THIS BOOK.

No, seriously. It's all about the science of cooking. I've been on such a science kick the last month or two (fueled by Wikipedia's extensive system of hyperlinked articles), and a food kick for longer than that, that it was only a matter of time before those two fascinations collided.

And to think, if I hadn't happened upon the Serious Eats website while searching for an explanation of the difference between baking powder and baking soda, my awareness of this book's existence may have been postponed even longer. Thank goodness for Food Lab! Hoh-man!

Red Wine Reduction...BBQ Sauce? Or Something?

So, I reduced the liquid to about...I'd say 25-40%. I wasn't paying too much attention to the amount at the beginning, but I know there was less than half when I called it quits. It smelled pretty awesome the whole time it was simmering. Eventually it got to a place where I didn't pucker my face at the alcohol content of this brothy substance. But what I really had to do was add some sugar. Brown sugar, specifically. So now I have a sweet-beefy-winey marinade of some sort. Might do some steak or something with it. Might not do anything with the potatoes because I don't think I'll have the time to mess around in the kitchen in the next couple of days. But that's ok, because I got 2 more AWESOME things done today! Firstly, I roasted a butternut squash: Which means soup...or squash cookies...or other general yumminess to occur in the future. I'll probably portion it out (it's all pureed now and refrigerating) and freeze it, for later use. Yummmmmsquashyum. And secondly/lastly, I made Russian tea cakes! For the first time! They turned out pretty good, though next time I'll probably make them more ball shaped (I was silly and followed the recipe when it said to smush the cookie-balls down a bit before baking them). And I'll make sure to have more powdered sugar on hand so I'm not so stingy with it. So YAY! I posted again, just like I said I would! Which means you (the reader/s) will hopefully check back for more. And, more importantly, I will hopefully have posted something more. ;) G'night!

Something Involving a Red Wine Reduction Sauce and Wine-Soaked Potatoes

Okay. In order to make sure I actually write about the culinary experiment/experience that's about to happen in my kitchen, I'm posting this now...pre-cooking. To maybe (at least) guilt myself into finishing this particular documentation.

So...on Monday, I made a pot roast in my crock pot. A crock pot roast, if you will. Being my second pot roast in as many weeks, I decided to do something a bit different than the last time: use red wine as the liquid base instead of broth. Unfortunately, since I'm not a qualified food scientist (yet), I failed to correctly calculate the probability of the wine reducing enough to not be alcoholic within the confines of my cooking method. I cooked the roast (along with some red potatoes and carrots) on low for about 9 hours. When I finally took the lid off and bit into a potato...it just tasted like a wine-soaked potato. Sadface. The roast was spectacularly flavored (in my opinion, at least), but alas...the vegetables were a failed attempt at ingenuity.

See here, the potatoes displayed thusly, in all their glorious failure:



So I saved the sauce (which is mostly wine, with a bit of beef juice and other seasonings), which is now reducing on the stove. I'm going to cook it down until it's pleasant to taste and won't get me tipsy, then perhaps add the veggies and make a soup. Add in a squash or something. Who knows?

Stay tuned...hopefully I'll have the next post up tonight. Or tomorrow. No promises. ;)

P.S. Thank you, interwebs, for entertaining my desire to write as though I have a large blog following with readers hanging on my every witty comment.

My take on a Harvest Bisque

We had a celebratory Autumnal Equinox/Full Moon dinner party last month at our house, and for it, I made my very first bisque.

I'd originally planned the flavor combination to be butternut squash, sage, and goat cheese. But a little ways into the soup-making process, I realized that I didn't have enough butternut squash. So I put in some canned tomatoes. Then it was too tomato-y. So I added some pumpkin that I'd been roasting. That brought it back to a squashy sort of yumminess.

For serving, I added some caramelized red onion, crumbled goat cheese, and fresh chopped sage leaves.



I must say, it turned out pretty well. 'Twas quite a dank way to start off the wintry months.

And it felt sooo good to walk out into the front room and see everyone sitting, eating, talking, laughing, etc. Definitely added to the cook's satisfaction. I see more dinner parties in my future. ^_^

Grand Central Bakery

Second. Pastry Post. In A Row.

Or third, if you count oatmeal cake as a pastry.

Anywho, stepped into a Grand Central Bakery this morning for the second time in my life.

First time was about a month ago, in Pioneer Square, while I was working on the Parfait truck during the Seattle Square Market. I thought I wanted a grilled cheese, then got inside and realized what I really wanted was their "tuna tosti," which is, essentially, a tuna melt. Grand Central tuna salad (which has an interesting more-salty-than-usual tang to it...owing partially to the capers they put in it), plus Beecher's Flagship Cheese, grilled on sourdough. Their bread is SO GOOD. I'd never had a tuna melt on good bread before. Of course, since I've only been eating tuna and mayonnaise for a few months now, I haven't had too many chances to enjoy tuna melts, good bread or no.

The people working behind the counter were fun to talk to while I waited for my sandwich. I told them I was working on the ice cream truck outside, and one of the guys was really excited and promised to come out and get some ice cream on his break. When he came up to the truck about an hour later, he declared (in a very apologetic way) that he didn't have any cash, but he brought things for trade. Apparently, to him, a $4.50 bowl of ice cream is worth 6 HUGE cookies and 3 full free coffee stamp cards. Works for me! (free cookies and coffee for the WIN!)

Which brings me to this morning. Stopped by the Eastlake location to pick up a dozen muffins, and got a latte and a sticky bun for myself. I'm all about culinary exploration right now, and before today I'd never eaten a sticky bun. Never even touched one. Can't remember seeing one in person either. But I'd heard about them...and totally thought they were just some cinnamon roll-type thing involving honey or something instead of icing.

Oh, was I wrong. Sticky buns are sooo much more.

In fact, I was so distracted by the sheer bliss I experienced in the nomming of this pastry that I didn't even get a picture of it before it was more than half-eaten.



Look at that carmelization! The pecans! The yum!

Srsly, though. The top is just chewy, sugary, ohmygod-ness. Plus nuts. Everything else is secondary.

Oh yeah, I was impressed with the latte, too. Manual espresso machine + Caffe Vita coffee = another win for Grand Central Bakery.

Nielsen's Authentic Danish Pastry

Pikansjos!

Actually, you won't find any of those here. You WILL, however, find quite the selection of delectable, delightful, and scrumptious Danish-style pastries which one could describe with many other synonyms of "yummy". They've got danishes, kringles, snitters...and a bunch of other things that I don't remember the funny names for.

Cookspace, the shared commercial kitchen that Parfait uses, is just a block away, which means that I was lucky enough to have happened upon Nielsen's one day heading to work. It makes me very sad that I've only made it back a handful of times since then.

This morning, though, I was picking up my check at the kitchen and was in serious need of some carbolicious nommage.

More shots of espresso than my body's used to in the morning + no food = Danish pastry deficit.
(Or, at least, that equation was true this morning.)



This one has ham and provolone. And at 8:30am, it was still warm. WIN! ^_^