Making simple look good

It turns out that risotto is actually fairly simple to make. I found a recipe at the grocery store and although I didn't follow it, I used it as a road map to what I wanted to do. My wife and I love Italian food but I'm tired of the typical pasta with sauce. I wanted a fancy dinner for my birthday but she wasn't up to going out this week so I decided to make a five star meal myself.

Now being the Fake Gourmand means that I've learned where to take shortcuts and where not to. For risotto there really wasn't any need to cheat or take shortcuts. The only ingredient that wasn't "fresh" was the mushrooms, since those are very seasonal you have to settle for either hothouse cultivated or dried. Since they're not the featured ingredient I had no problem with the dried. Using dried mushrooms is much like using dried herbs, so long as they're new they have more flavor than fresh (ounce for ounce).

Seeing a caprese salad on my table is no shock to anyone, but if you don't want a pile of lettuce as your salad it is a pretty simple way to spruce up a meal. Caprese salad can contain other ingredients but it is basically tomato, mozzarella cheese, fresh basil, olive oil and really good balsamic vinegar. I've seen garlic, red onion, black pepper, salt and other ingredients added but I'm a fan of the minimalist approach and if you have really good ingredients, it is all you need. Since mozzarella comes in roughly a dozen different sizes and shapes, don't settle for the big lump, experiment a little and have fun. You can also substitute other cheeses, but don't stray too far from the texture of mozzarella or it can get weird fast.

The second element of my meal is the bread. I bake bread on a fairly regular basis, but if you don't plan ahead you can't exactly bake a loaf of bread on the fly. However, you can take grocery store or bakery bread and add your own spin to it. This go round I found a nice Italian round loaf and cut it into approximately half inch slices, that's 1.25 centimeters for my metric friends! :-) I brush the slices with melted butter, a fair amount, but not so much as to make it greasy.  I then sprinkle a little granulated roasted garlic on there and follow that up with some form of dry Italian cheese, in this case Parmesan. Set the oven to something pretty high, I went 450 today but I'm not super consistent and it doesn't seem to matter too much. Bake until they become toast and the cheese on top has browned, but the bread hasn't burned yet. I don't time it, I like to eyeball cook when I can, but it was about 10 minutes.

Last but certainly not least was the Chicken and mushroom risotto. The key to good risotto is simply patience and proper ingredients. Again I don't time it, but I would say the risotto took about 30 to 40 minutes. Before you get started on the actual cooking, start about 6 cups of chicken stock warming in a sauce pan, you don't want to add it cold and also add about a half cup of the warm stock to your mushrooms if you have dried.  I start by sauteing about 3/4 of a pound of chicken breast, once its cooked through I set aside. In the same pan I then saute a shallot with about a tablespoon of olive oil. Once the shallot has become soft, add two cups of Arborio rice (available at most grocery stores if you look hard enough) and let it toast a little, but stir it the whole time, it will burn quickly if you leave it alone or if you leave the heat too high. Make sure your pan isn't too hot and turn it to your lowest setting. Add your mushrooms at this point and unless you had a ton of stock with the mushrooms you'll want to add about a half cup of white wine at this point, wine has alcohol and can flash, so pay attention or risk loosing your eyebrows. Once the rice stops smelling like strong alcohol, start adding the warm stock one big ladle at a time. I don't stir the whole time, but I also don't let it go very long without a stir. While the rice is cooking I large dice the chicken I sauteed earlier and add it just before it is done to make sure it hasn't cooled too much. Last but not least, mix in some parmigiano regiano cheese (however you spell it) to taste to finish it off, the recipe called for a cup, but I didn't use that much. Remember that dense dry white cheeses have a salt content, so don't over do it.

Serve with a nice Pinot Grigio or other white wine and enjoy!

Birthday Dinner (you can tell I set the table, I ALWAYS forget napkins!)

Caprese salad with the battle of the tomatoes, the two rows on top were grown in my garden, the bottom row is the steroid enhanced grocery store variety. (no actual steroids used)

Chicken and mushroom risotto, it dried up a little but was still good.

Crustini, sort of.

Comfort Food

Comfort Food So I had a stressful day at work today, no yelling or screaming or anything drastic, just the stress of a couple of important projects going on and it was one of those days where NOTHING goes as planned, no one answers their phone and time sensitive stuff isn’t finished yet. When I get home, I almost always do one of two things. I go running or I eat dinner. Running has proven stress release properties but today I got to thinking about the concept of comfort food. By no means do I advise using food as a crutch in your life, BUT I do think when used safely, comfort food might be just the thing to try once in a while.

I've never really thought much about what my comfort foods would be. If you watch as much food network as I do, there seems to comfort standards out there. Fried Chicken, Mac and Cheese or anything with bacon come to mind. I like all of that stuff, but it doesn’t have the same connection to me as it might to others. So, what are my comfort foods?

 For me, the food has to have a connection to something that good, pure or happy in your life. I don’t recall my mother making fried chicken very much, although we did enjoy some chicken from the colonel on occasion, but not enough for me to draw comfort from it as an adult. When it comes to childhood food, believe it or not I find great comfort in a soup and sandwich on a cold or gray day. As an adult, I use tomato soup and a grilled cheese, but as a kid it might have been a PB&J and a bowl of chicken noodle. I recall really loving New England clam chowder and vegetarian vegetable soup as well. I think a kid liking clam chowder is odd, but if you’ve met me, then or now, you’d understand. Since moving to Arizona, I don’t eat soup often, but luckily soup in a can lasts a very long time, so I always have some available.

Another food I draw comfort in is from my time in Okinawa. I have no idea of its origin, but while in Japan, I ate pseudo Mexican food prepared by Pilipino women. My global adventure of food was simply called “Taco, Rice and Cheese”, and it was in fact those three ingredients. A bed of rice with a particularly greasy scoop of taco meat on it, then absolutely buried in some yellow cheese I’ve never quite duplicated. As a civilian, tonight included, I’ve made a version of Taco, Rice and Cheese that is slightly less un-nutritious, but has done the job for me. I’d include a recipe, but it is beyond simple. I use a Taco seasoning mix and follow the directions the only change is that I use a leaner ground beef than I’m sure they used in Okinawa. I’m also positive I’m buying cow here, but that’s a story for another day. I think the 93/7 is the leanest stuff you can get here and it works just fine. I use a single boil in the bag worth of rice and I use a mild cheddar cheese and I grate it myself, the pre-grated stuff doesn’t melt the same and I’m not sure why, maybe it’s fake?

If I know I’m going to have a stressful day in advance I try to have a donut for breakfast, but it is really hard to predict having a stressful day. For the record, the best donut for this purpose is the Boston cream donut. Depending on where you buy them, Bavarian cream and Boston cream CAN be the same thing, but sometimes they are not. I want the one with custard in the middle, not whipped cream. If I’m going for comfort, no shortcuts please. Of course, said donut must be consumed with coffee or hot chocolate, depending on when in my life it was. I guess this one is linked to my childhood and my time working at the Lakewood Civic Auditorium. At some point the manager and I declared Boston Cream the official donut of the Auditorium and would make the road crews bring donuts if they wanted us to play nice. I think my last comfort food is something that I do indulge in on a regular basis.

Almost every Sunday Jen and I have a nice sit down brunch. Whether it is pancakes, French toast or waffles, they’re just dripping with comfort. It doesn’t hurt to include a side of bacon or hash browns, but the vessel for my maple syrup is the key to the comfort. I’m not sure where I developed my love for anything dripping with butter and maple syrup, but as an adult it has developed into one of those things that married couples call “their” things. Brunch is our thing…and oh so comfortable. So what’s your comfort food?

My "Garden"

I've always felt you could only 100% claim something was "homemade" if you helped grow the ingredients. Since I have lived in cities my entire life it is unrealistic to think that I could grow my own food. Plus, farming is hard work and I have a job already. That being said, last year I decided to try some things. I looked over the seeds available in the "Mega-Hardware store" and quickly decided that Basil, Cilantro and Roma Tomato would be my first experiments.

The blazing hot summers in Arizona present a real challenge so I figured I would start my garden in the fall and grow through the winter. On paper this seemed like a great idea. However, I live at a little bit of elevation on the outskirts of town and every few years we get a freeze up here. Last winter we got three. I lost my first batch of basil and tomato to the freeze last year, but I did learn some lessons. Lesson number 1, the plants don't like the cold either (duh!). Lesson number 2, you can't kill cilantro if you try. I have a friend or two that would happy to call cilantro a weed and not an herb, and this lesson made it harder to argue that point :-) After a few weeks I learned a third lesson, you can't just let cilantro grow indefinitely, it becomes coriander (and hideously ugly) after awhile. So now I have a container filled with coriander/cilantro seeds that maybe some day I'll use to grow more cilantro or grind to use as coriander. (Anyone have a good recipe with coriander in it? I don't)

However, this story isn't about cilantro. I did use some of it in Guacamole and Green Salsa within that two or three week sweet spot in it's growth period. What I really want to talk about is the Basil and Tomato. As I stated earlier, I had lost those "crops" to the harsh winter (okay, it hit 29, but that's harsh here!). Last spring the flower boxes I had been using started to spring little green signs of life. At first I assumed that the tree they sat under had it's way with them, but I was pleasantly wrong. (That's right, I'm admitting I was wrong, don't get used to it!)

I now have two full flower pots of Roma Tomatoes and a sense that in combination with that basil I will be eating caprese salad often in the not too distance future. I picked my first tomato from this seasons crops and although there are no others very close to being ready I was excited. The last time I tried this I did get 1 tomato, yep ONE. I think I have several dozen growing right now and I believe the little bit of winter we get here in Arizona has mostly passed, so I'm fairly optimistic that this little adventure will pan out. I'm sure I'll be blogging about all the amazing recipes I've found for my herbs and vegetables in the future, but for now anyways, I'm simply crossing "farm" off of my bucket list. I'm sure my mother will get a kick out my claiming that three flower boxes of plants is "farming" but hey, they're organic and locally grown, they up-sell that in the grocery store! :-)

Starting the year off right, with a winner recipe

This Year's first adventure, homemade granola

On a recent piece on NPR I heard about a book called "Make the Bread, Buy the Butter". The general premise of the book is that a woman decided to home make all of the stuff she buys to see if she could make it better or cheaper, but relatively easily. (She being the author Jennifer Reese) I immediately purchased the book myself since I'm always looking for a kitchen adventure, although I admit, I won't be hanging any prosciutto in my kitchen to cure any time soon.

I've been looking for a good solution to my breakfast dilemma, that dilemma being, I don't like to eat breakfast. I love to run, but jetting out the door on an empty stomach only to run eight miles is a bad idea to say the least. I'm also really freaking hungry by the time lunch rolls around at work. As I flipped through the pages, Granola struck me right away. I figured I had two things I could do here. First, granola, as is, I find pretty yummy and I recall hearing it has plenty of caloric punch for it's size. Second, I could combine the granola with some of the leftover dried fruit I have from this season's fruitcake and make a sort of trail mix.

I did quite a bit of regular cooking yesterday, chicken Parmesan and corned beef (for two different reasons, not for the same meal!) so I was really hoping that granola wasn't too difficult. Honestly, your kids could make this. Of course only my mother reads my blog, so her kid DID make this, but you get the point. You just mix all the ingredients in a bowl with a wooden spoon, spread on a cookie sheet and bake. No rotating the tray or stirring during the baking, just plain old waiting.

Warning: one unfortunate side effect is that I can't stop eating the stuff and you're house will smell like the breathe of a gingerbread man, it's quite divine. IF any is left for me to make trail mix with I'll probably write about that in my running blog, in the mean while, this stuff is great just like this. Recipe to follow:

3 cups rolled oats

1 cup almonds (I used blanched and slivered)

1/2 cup chopped pecans

1/4 cup wheat germ (sold in the cereal isle if you can't find it)

1/3 cup maple syrup (REAL, not maple flavored sugar water)

3/4 cup sweetened coconut shreds

1/3 cup light brown sugar

1/4 cup (half a stick) of melted butter

3/4 teaspoon kosher salt (I forgot to add this and don't miss it)

Preheat oven to 250 degrees F

Mix everything by hand, I think a mixer would wig out

Bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes

let cool and then break it up and enjoy