Comfort Food

It's been raining yet again here in NYC, and it has me craving comfort food. After a long day I work, I headed on over to the grocery store and went shopping. Not wanting chicken again, I opted for the other white meat: pork! Autumnal foods always remind me of home and comfort, so even though the temperature was pushing 85 I purchased a sweet potato and rosemary. Ready to get comfortized!


Contents:
Rosemary Pork

• Pork
• Rosemary
• Olive oil
• Salt and Pepper
• Garlic

Marinade the pork in the rosemary, salt, pepper and a little olive oil while preparing everything else. Bake at 375 F for about 25 minutes. Lower heat and longer cooking time will yield more tender meat (and vice versa). I topped my pork off with chopped garlic for the last five minutes of cooking, although it could have been added sooner.

Sweet Potato Fries

• Sweet potato cut into thick slices or wedges
• Salt and Pepper
• Olive Oil (cook spray would be preferable - see below)

Coat the sweet potato slices with salt, pepper and a touch of olive oil. I used too much olive oil and so my fries turned out a little on the wimpy side. If you can avoid using oil all together, I think they would turn out much crisper. Anyway, bake at 400 F for 30 minutes.

The greens are broccoli rabe that have been boiled until tender and then sauteed with garlic.

So, this was last night. Today I was working on my Italian and practicing the imperfect tense. I was to write about what I used to do as a child, and one of the questions happened to be "Che cosa preferivi mangiare?" (What did you prefer to eat?) To which I responded, "Preferivo mangiare la lasagna." (I preferred to eat lasagna.) Stoffer's lasagna, to be exact. It's such a guilty pleasure, and I'm slightly embarrassed to admit it. You'd think after rolling my own pasta dough, making my own tomato sauce and bechemel sauce, that a frozen Stoffer's lasagna should taste like an edible form of blasphemy to the Italian culture, but I still love it.

As far as I remember, I always asked for Stoffer's lasagna to be my special birthday dinner. My favorite part about it was the little cheese balls (what they called "ricotta" cheese), and they were even better because my brother hated them. I love it when I can kill two birds with one stone. Maybe it was my way of ensuring that my brother got no enjoyment from my birthday night; his birthday was just two days later, and then I'd have to comply with his every wish and demand.

Missing home, I picked up a frozen one at the store. It brought me right back to a chilly December 2nd night. It's nice how some things never change.

Not Italian

Still struggling with replenishing my food supply from my vacation, I find myself one night with only a piece of tilapia in my freezer. For some reason this day I have very little inspiration for cooking ideas and resort to calling my mom to ask for suggestions. I ask her what she'd recommend with tilapia and, being an honorary Texan, she tells me I should cook Mexican food. I rarely cook Mexican food, even though I absolutely love eating it. Now that my salivary glands have kicked into gear thinking about cilantro and jalapenos, I walk to the grocery store in search of something not Italian.

Oddly enough, I end up getting nothing that is Mexican. When I first walked in some plantains caught my eye, and I decided to go a more Cuban route. I do admit that this meal was hardly authentic. Aside from the plantains, I don't even know if it is necessarily Cuban, but that doesn't really matter because it was tasty.

Contents:

• Tilapia baked with salsa
• Plantains sauteed with sugar
• Black beans with roasted corn

Yes, I realize that the picture is quite awful. At this point in the night taking a nice picture was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to eat.

My technique could be greatly improved. Since the only corn I had in my apartment was off-the-cob and canned, the only way I could think of "roasting" it was to scatter it onto a baking sheet and stick it in the oven for a while. The end result was really dried out corn, but once I mixed it into the black beans the kernels were slightly rehydrated. Obviously, the better option would have been to buy a real ear of corn and then roast it inside of its husk, but that was not going to happen on this night.

Somewhat of a success, somewhat not. Either way I was fed and had a change of flavors which were the real goals anyway.

More Chicken

I've just returned from a beach vacation, sunburned as always and relaxed. Not having much in the apartment, I quickly ran to the grocery store to stock up before it closed Sunday night. In my haste I returned with a couple of things to make a salad with, chicken breasts, broccoli rabe, mangoes and blueberries. I had no real meal plan in mind; I just grabbed as I breezed through. By the time Monday night rolls around, I'm stuck with only chicken and broccoli rabe for dinner options. Not too bad, but not really that exciting either as I had nothing to make the chicken infused with some interesting flavor.

Finally contented with the idea that I was going to have a boring dinner, I rubbed the chicken breast (bones in!) with some spice mixture I found in the cupboard (who knows how long that has been there...don't judge me) and some olive oil. I threw it onto our one and only baking pan and into the oven at 375 for 30 minutes. I said a little prayer for the chicken to be cooked all the way through and then moved onto the broccoli rabe.

Now if I must brag for a second or two, I must say that I do know how to work the broccoli rabe. Or maybe it's really that I just love, love, love broccoli rabe and could eat it at every meal if I could get my hands on enough of it. For some reason I have the hardest time finding it down in Texas, but here in Little Italy I am never more than a stone's throw away from getting my hands on some leafy green goodness.

Anyway, I wash, chop, and boil until the stalks are tender. Drain. Transfer to a skillet with olive oil and garlic. Reheat. Sprinkle on crushed red pepper. Mangia! It's so simple and really hard to mess up, in my opinion.

The chicken turned out great - and cooked all the way through. It had this really nice crunchy top layer that I love. It was really juicy and surprisingly flavorful thanks to the spices and the copious amount of salt I poured onto it. Maybe it wasn't the most creative, exciting dinner I've made, but it definitely hit the spot.

Chicken Bones

Throughout all of my cooking experiments, I have a limited experience with chicken. Blame it on my on-and-off again vegetarianism or the fact that my dad always mans the grill at home, but the only way I have ever cooked chicken is (on my own that is) in a skillet on the stove top. What's more, is that I've always used skinless, boneless filleted chicken breast. In a way, I feel somewhat ashamed of my lack of creativity in this department. It was time for a change.

So one particularly boring day here in Manhattan, I decided to tackle chicken with bones. I really actually wanted to cook a whole chicken, but seeing how I only have one medium sized pot and one medium sized skillet, the whole chicken would just have to wait. At the store, I picked up two large-ish chicken breasts with rib bones. In my cookbook from Italy, I found a recipe for boiled chicken. Yes, boiled chicken isn't really that much more exciting than skillet-cooked boneless, skinless chicken breast, but it's all about baby steps, right?

I get home, plop my chickens into the pot with enough water to cover them, add in some carrots and onions. The recipe called for celery as well, and I really should have used it. However, I just can't convince myself that it's worth it to buy celery because I know I will use one stalk and then the next time I think about celery again will be when I'm wondering what that light green slime is in the back of the fridge. Since I like to avoid slime, I skip the celery. Anyway, I bring that up to a boil, cover it, and feel quite pleased that I've whittled away another hour of my time.

The chicken is supposed to cook for two hours, so I have two options: 1) go back to bed and wallow in my own self pity of how boring my life is or 2) cook some more. Since being in bed would require me to look out of my window reminding me that I'm in New York City, I choose the latter.

I open my fridge: olives, anchovies, garlic, bread, capers, basil. There has got to be some kind of concoction I can come up with from these items. I find a recipe for olive toast from Umbria and Salsa Verde from Emilia-Romagna. Perfetto!


Contents:
Pollo lesso

• Chicken
• Carrot
• Onion

Boil until cooked. Simplice!

Salsa Verde

• Basil
• Garlic
• Anchovies
• Capers
• Bread crumbs
• Olive oil

Chop finely and combine. Pour on top of chicken. Eat. My version of this is not entirely traditional because I lacked a few of the ingredients, mainly white vinegar. I also omitted parsley simply because I hate parsley.

Crostini di Olive

• Black olives
• Garlic
• Anchovies
• Capers
• Olive oil
  
• Bread

Chop this all (except for the bread) as finely as you can. Mix with a good amount of olive oil. Toast the bread until just golden brown and spread the olive paste on while it's still hot. The bread just soaks up the olive oil and perfumes the entire room. If you can prepare the paste ahead of time, the flavors will mellow together. It's super salty and savory - just what I like. Be sure to use really good black olives. The ones I used were cured, but fresh would be equally as delicious.

Although I never made it in my cooking class, I actually had crostini di olive when I was in Italy. It was Sunday night. My roommates and I had just returned from Cinque Terre (one of the most beautiful places on earth). We had no food in the apartment since we had been gone for three days, so Molly and I decided to go out to eat. Exhausted from hiking for the past two days along the Mediterranean coast (what a rough life I lead...) we didn't want to walk that far, so we picked a little restaurant in Piazza di Santo Spirito just a block from our apartment. I didn't enjoy my pasta dish (flaked salmon, arugula with some kind of bland cream sauce) but the free bread with olive paste was really good.

Make Your Own Wine?!

I was searching the internets for good Italian wine shops in Houston (so I know where to head once I get back home), and I stumbled upon this little place called Salud!. It's in Montrose, looks adorable, and apparently has the capabilities of letting you create your own wine. How awesome! I really want to check this place out once I'm back in town. Birthday/Christmas present idea? I think so!

Salad!

As much as I complain about not being able to eat carbohydrates right now, this restriction has forced me to make more salads, which I really love doing (and eating). Salads are great in the summer, require little preparation, and full of nutrition (if you want it to be).


Contents:

• Mescalin salad greens
• Avocado
• Tomato
• Roasted red peppers
• Pecorino cheese (mine is from the Basilicata region)
  
• Olive oil and balsamic vinegar
• Salt and pepper

It's not an ingenious combination, but it's what I had laying around - and isn't that supposed to be the purpose of a salad anyway? At least, I think it is. Throw whatever you need to use up on top of salad greens and munch away.

It's still raining here in New York, but this salad helped remind me that it is actually summer. I had almost forgotten! At this point I really think I would prefer the 100 degree Houston weather to all of this rain.