A sexy make-over?

Coq Au Vin in my (newish) Le Creuset.  Must have been feeling French tonight.....and I realized the only way I can get close to an entire bottle of red wine is by cooking with it.  I followed the recipe that came in the little booklet thingy that was with the Le Creuset French oven Fre bought me for my bday.  It's a winner of a recipe and the pics turned out like a sexy makeover.....plain and simple before, saucy and tempting after. :-)

BEFORE the oven:

AFTER the magic:

Poppy Seed Cookies - Simple but perfect

I pretty much forget about poppy seeds until the holidays come around and I start dreaming about the poppy seed bread my Grandma Arndt used to make every Christmas (a recipe I'm still working to perfect).  As I was driving home a few nights ago I heard a bit on NPR about these two women who collect old recipes.  They told this great story about an Aunt of theirs who was famous for her poppy seed cookies.  Having never made them, and feeling like it's kinda the beginning of the holidays and therefore poppy seed time in my world, I decided to give them a crack this morning.  They're simple, quick and perfect to eat by the handful.

3 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 cup poppy seeds

1 cup peanut oil ( I used canola, turned out just fine)

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Cover a 14 X 16-inch baking sheet with foil, shiny side up. Coat the foil with vegetable spray or use a silicone liner.

Sift together flour and baking powder; add poppy seeds.

Separately, whisk peanut oil, sugar, eggs, and vanilla in a medium bowl. Add sifted dry ingredients and mix to combine. Chill the dough in the refrigerator one hour, or until firm enough to handle.

Using your hands, break off teaspoon-size pieces of dough and roll into small balls. Place dough balls on baking sheet about 2 inches apart, or 12 cookies per sheet. Pat into circles with your fingers (rather than rolling or stamping). Bake 10 to 12 minutes, or until lightly browned around edges. Let cookies cool 1 minute on baking sheet on rack and then transfer cookies to a rack. Cookies will become crisp as they cool.

Butternut Squash Pasta

Last weekend it was a little "chilly" ( ya know, in the low 70's) here in FL, so I was in the mood to make something that felt like fall.

I improvised a butternut squash pasta sauce (roasted the butternut squash in the oven, pureed it in the food processor with some buttermilk, thyme, salt, pepper, sauteed onions & garlic and a tab bit of nutmeg).  To up the veggie content of the dish I used half pasta and half steamed cauliflower.

Of course I added some Parmesan cheese into the pasta sauce, threw it all into a dish with some fresh basil chicken I had roasted in the oven, sauteed mushrooms and topped it off with a decent amount of munster cheese.

It was a completely made-up recipe/dish, but it's a keeper!  And if you go with low-fat cheese, or lower the amount of cheese, this is completely guilt-free but really creamy and satisfying.

We're so hip, urban, and green

This is my first blog posting ever. Interesting, eh? The youngest and only male Arndt kid, who preferred math and sports over books (unlike his sisters), doesn't maintain an online journal? Crazy, I know. Also, Jen and I don't have a camera right now, so pardon the mediocre phone pictures.

This weekend Jen and I grew up a bit. And by that I mean, we started a garden. While apartment hunting a few months ago, we actually picked our new unit within the complex based on two things: how our sectional couch fit into the living room (think left-handed vs. right-handed), and more importantly here, which balcony received better sunlight.

We began with herbs. While I appreciate beauty, at my core I'm all about utility. So, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon here in Houston, Jen and I drove to a nearby garden store. After walking around for a while as if we knew what we were looking for, we finally asked an employee for help. We picked out pots and herbs (rosemary, basil, and dill), and then super luckily got to plant them (for free!) at the store. 

Getting our hands dirty planting our herbs.

Back at home, Jen and I put our pots on the balcony and are adjusting to the new responsibility of "watering."

Jen enjoying the smell of basil and rosemary on the balcony.

 

Basil, rosemary, and dill in the back.

 Stay tuned for posts about actually cooking or eating food. They're a' coming!

Fresh Pasta - I'm not afraid anymore

For some reason I had this fear of making fresh pasta....it could be due to a pretty much inedible gnocchi attempt on xmas eve a few years back, but whatever the reason, I was nervous to give it a shot.  Well, when it doubt of your own skills, buy things to supplement your feeling of inadequacy, right?  So I headed over to William Sonoma on Sunday and picked up a pasta roller, figuring if I could at least get the dough right, I could bypass the whole "old-italian-grandma hand rolling pasta" thing by using a hand cranked roller. 

Armed with my shiny new roller, I decided to give it a try.  Heaven forbid I just try something easy on foodnetwork, so I hauled out my French Laundry cookbook and decided to give Thomas Keller a run for his money. I settled on a sweet potato ravioli and figured I would concoct my own white wine mushroom sauce.  The filling was fairly easy (roasted some sweet potatoes, added a bunch of butter, some buttermilk, nutmeg, salt, pepper and of course some bacon).  I finished that first and set it aside to cool while I gave pasta dough a shot.

I read the directions in Kellers book, but in the end decided I need a more visual demonstration of his technique for kneading the dough as he said you don't knead it like you would a bread dough so I headed to YouTube.  Found a few great videos and armed with my new knowledge, gave it a shot.  It was crazy easy!

 About 10 minutes of kneading and then I let it rest for about 30 minutes before I rolled it through my shiny new pasta roller into sheets for ravioli.  I threw the filling on, folded it over and sealed them closed with some egg wash.

Overall a lot more simple than I thought.  That said, my ravioli technique needs a ton of improvement.  The mushroom sauce turned out fantastic, but I should have used white button mushrooms instead of baby portabellas....once the portabellas were cooked and I had blended the sauce with an immersion blender, the sauce took on a bit of a grey color, which I wasn't a huge fan of.  Lesson learned.

Biltmore Beauty

Jack and I are road tripping through the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway this week. It is our first time seeing this beautiful part of the country. Today we toured the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. What can one say about a "house" that has 250 rooms, 175,000 square feet, and covers four full acres (just the house, not the grounds)? All I could think of was "king's castle." It was magnificent, yes, but I guess I understand a little better now why the common people and peasants left Europe to escape the aristocracy.

What I loved more than the house was the grounds. We walked through some of the eight thousand acres, which included forests, gardens, ponds, and meadows. Most of it had been professionally landscaped when the estate was first constructed more than a century ago, so everything now mature and lush. I was told by one of the employees that more than 1800 people work on the estate. I wasn't surprised to hear his estimate, considering that the Biltmore also has a working farm with livestock, vineyards, and a winery. It is certainly a beautiful and fantastic place to visit and is rich (pun intended) in American history.

Jack and I worked up an appetite from all of our walking, so we ate at one of the restaurants on the grounds. Cedric's Tavern was named after the Vanderbilt family's St Bernard. The restaurant was an Irish pub, and you all know how much Jack loves those places! He ordered Shepherd's Pie and a beer sampler tray. I had a wonderful grilled beef and pork meatloaf, which was drizzled with chipotle ketchup and rested on buttermilk-and-roasted-garlic mashed potatoes. Delicious! But even more tasty and unique were the beer battered green beans. They had a slightly sweet coating, which lightly covered each bean...just enough to give a little crunch and flavor. I'll have to figure out how to make them at home.

I've included a few photos of our day.

                                             Today was also Jack's birthday. Happy 61st!

                                            This was the beautiful Italian garden.
                                           

                                             The gardeners planted thousands of mums
                                             for a spectacular autumn display.

Monday morning we start on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I excited to see the colorful vistas which I've heard so much about.

Pork and Portabella Grilled Skewers & Maple Stout Bread

Fall in Florida isn't exactly jeans and sweater weather (I think it was 85 today) but following a trip to Conners farm this morning with Fre and Scarlett to run through the corn maze, ride the tractor and pet the farm animals, I felt like trying something "fall like" for dinner. After checking what I had in the fridge and the pantry, I came up with an idea for some grilled pork skewers with mushrooms and a basil/garlic sauce.  I marinated some boneless pork chops in white wine, olive oil, fresh thyme, rosemary, salt, pepper and garlic for about 2 hours.  While that was working in the fridge, I decided to try making a celery root puree as a side dish. On a complete whim this morning I bought some celery root for the first time at the grocery store so I wanted to try it out.  I boiled two celery roots (after peeling and chopping into about 1 inch cubes) with two russet potatoes....and instead of boiling them in salted water, I boiled them in milk, knowing it would tame a bit of the bite of the celery root.  After about 15 minutes I drained it all, threw it in the food processor and added garlic, about a 1/2 cup of buttermilk and salt and pepper.  

Finally, I stuck the pork on the skewers with some portabellas, hit the mushrooms with a little olive oil so they wouldn't stick to the grill, and threw them on there for about 5-6 minutes.  While Fre was watching the grill, I missed up aboutg 1/2 cup of finally chopped scallions, 1/2 cup of basil, some olive oil, minced garlic, salt and pepper as a little "sauce" to top the skewers.

To finish it all off, earlier in the day I came across a recipe for a Maple Stout quick bread in the new Cooking Light issue.  The combo of maple syrup and a Guinness sounded interested so I gave it a try.  This is an amazingly easy and delicious quick bread. I mixed it up, headed out for a run, and by the time I got back it was just about ready to take out of the oven.  Top it off with a drizzle of a maple syrup glaze (i just mixed maple syrup and some powdered sugar) and you're set.  Eat a slice with a cold Guinness.....perfect.