More quick snacks

Vegan red pepper pasta from Ohio City Pasta, Sungold, Yellow Pear, and small Roma tomatoes sauteed in olive oil, and basil. A bowl of summer.

Romanian made Polish food. Pierogies and red onions sauteed together in butter. The cheddar cheese/potato pierogies were from a Romanian-run stand at the Shaker Farmers Market, the onions from Blissful Acres, also at the Market. With a Polish grandmother married to my Romanian grandfather, it's not shocking that these have become my go-to snack.

Pasta with Lamb-Tomato Sauce

Curry flavored pasta with a ground lamb-tomato-onion-carrot-squash-basil sauce. There were some chili flakes in there too. Lamb, carrots, and onion from the farmers market, canned tomato from the West Side food co-op, Italian heirloom squash and basil from the garden, and homemade pasta.

Short posts lately, and not too many this week either. It will be the trend for the next few weeks while The CFT relocates. Not sure whether it's a move up, down, or sideways, but the new place will be mine, complete with peaches, black walnuts (at least for the remainder of the season), mint, concord grapes (that will be replaced with a more worthy berry), a chicken coop that predates me, and enough work to warrant a 40 yard dumpster (not to worry--I'm saving/repurposing what I can). In the meantime, please bear with me.

Pork Soup Lunch

Pork chunks wok cooked with cumin in a chicken stock broth with potatoes, carrots, onion, dried chiles, and summer savory. Soup on a hot day. I don't know why, but it works.

Eggs eye view

Or, breakfast for lovers of heat. This is a dish a friend of mine likes to have for breakfast when she's sick. It's a normal breakfast, but it'll clear the sinuses.

Eggs. Plum Creek eggs, Ohio Family Farms cream, Snake Hill Farm Siskiyou immature onions, dried chilis de arbol, garden basil, butter, and salt and Urban Herbs tellicherry pepper. I sauteed thinly sliced onion along chilis (seeded and pulled apart) in some butter with a little salt. Once the onions softened I added eggs that had been stirred to combine the whites, yolks, and a little cream to the pan. Stirring constantly, I cooked the eggs over low heat, adding some salt and ground pepper while they were cooking. Once everything was just about cooked (but still very soft), I added a little basil chiffonade. The basil brought out the best from the onions and chili, and generally made everything smell nice.

Potatoes. Small red potatoes from the Shaker Market, shallots from the same place, Parker's pancetta, underformed (green?) garlic from the garden, hot red pepper flakes, salt and pepper. I started by rendering small lardons of pancetta in a cast iron skillet. Once the pancetta was rendered I added cut up potatoes (with the skin still on), sliced shallot, pepper flakes, and salt and pepper. I put the whole pan in a 450 oven for a good ten minutes, and then under the broiler for about five more minutes. After the potatoes were cooked just about right I turned off the broiler and added smashed and minced garlic to the mix, stirred, and left the whole thing in the still very hot oven (with the heat off) for about five more minutes. Everything was crispy, but nothing was bitter.

And that was it. With some toast and tea it's a pretty acceptable breakfast that's ready to go in around half an hour.

Yes we can . . .

make leftover sauce taste new, and do a whole lot of other stuff depending on who you ask (One of whose commercials are finally going to come to an end, at least for a short bit.). Pictured above is last week's tomato and sausage sauce, this time on pasta, refreshed with some sauteed sliced onions, diced carrots and celery, and dried hot pepper flakes. I also added a touch of cream and some pasta water. It was a whole new sauce.

After a very good dinner at one of my favorite Columbus (Ohio) restaurants, The Burgundy Room, last night, and with another coming up tomorrow at Bar Cento (check this out if you're curious--in collaboration with Slow Food Northern Ohio), a simple comforting meal seemed appropriate. As for The Burgundy Room, Monday night was retail wine night, with some really enjoyable bottles available for under $30. As for the food, the hits included a Snapper Special, a very solid Mixed Greens Salad (with some of the best onions I've ever tasted), a Beet Dip, a Rabbit Confit (served like a rillette), Shrimp and Grits, and awesome Caramel with very good Honey Vanilla Ice Creams. Misses, in the opinion of a co-diner and me, included the Green Apple and Celery Salad, and, in the same co-diner's opinion, Duck Spring Rolls (which I didn't try). Overall a great eating experience.

Does Cleveland's 2182 Bistro and Wine Bar stack up to The Burgundy Room? It's a totally different feel, but it may be the area's closest answer for small plates of pristine food and great wine priced reasonably. Can't say I'm a fan of the location though.

Sliced steak

Sliced Delmonico steak (which can mean about 100 different things depending on where you get it), white and red cipollini onions (Can cipollinis be red? Not sure, but that's the basket where the fine folks at Snake Hill Farm put them, so we'll go with that.), wilted spinach, and some leftover grits (I made this a few days ago, so the grits weren't too old.). Some mushrooms may have been nice (I've really been slacking on taking advantage of the great things from Killbuck Valley Mushrooms.), but they weren't required. The steak and spinach were from the grocery store (hormone free and organic, respectfully), so options were limited.

Onions
Ingredients:
- Onions, halved and sliced
- Butter
- Salt and pepper
Method:
- Heat butter in a pan
- Add onions, salt and some pepper
- Maintain on a medium-low heat until they're to your liking, stirring relatively often

Steak
Ingredients:
- Steak
- Salt and pepper
- High heat oil
Method:
- Get uncoated frying pan very hot and add oil
- Season steak
- Sear both sides and the sides of the steak
- When it's how you like it (As you can see, I'm a medium rare-rare person myself.*) leave it to to rest
- Turn off heat, but don't clean pan

Spinach
Ingredients:
- Spinach
- Salt and pepper (See a theme with the ingredients in this meal?)
Method:
- Pan should still be a bit greasy and hot (if not add some oil/turn on heat)
- Add spinach and a little salt and pepper, quickly turning being sure none of the spinach stays on the bottom of the pan too long
- Remove from pan with tongs, squeezing and leaving as much liquid as possible in the pan

Grits
- See previous post, or just bake or mash a potato

Once spinach is laid out on a plate slice steak across the grain (As much as possible--the grain is not to consistent on this cut of beef, and this step is not all that important here.) and plate. You could make a quick pan sauce with stock or cream (or both), but it's not really necessary.

* My two cents on ordering a steak in a restaurant (Which I rarely do, as such great meat is available at the consumer level, and it's a pretty easy preparation.)--order it rare, medium-rare, medium, possibly medium-well, or well (if you're not concerned about your piece of meat). My point is that I do not recommend saying something like "Medium-rare but on the rare side," or "Slightly more cooked than medium." It just doesn't work, generally, and it messes with your server. At the typical restaurant the server is writing your order on a ticket that will be placed in front of a cook or relayed through the restaurant's computer system. At least in any place I've seen, there is no "Medium-rare but on the rare side" code for the ticket, or button for the system.

I agree, it is a service industry. But, while I truly believe that restaurant personnel adulterating (for lack of a better term) customers' food is not all that common, why annoy them? First, very few servers that I know want to get into an extended conversation with the cook about an order during a busy dinner service (the cook is likely even less inclined to participate in that discussion). Second, if you're that picky (and I tend to be), just make it yourself.

Dessert?

Or a savory snack? A trip to the farmers' market yielded an abundance of onions (Little cippolinis from Snake Hill Farm, an amazing piece of land in Geauga County, Ohio. The pun--the farm is run by Savory and Lou--is unintentional.) and apples (Galas, and a Honeycrisp, from a local orchard.). Also, the flours from my food purchasing group were adding up, so a tart/pie was in order.

I combined Oak and Spelt flours, and it resulted in a good tasting base for the apples and onions. Not too much like a pie or tart dough though. I don't think going for the free form thing was such a good idea in this case either.

The addition of Cardamom made the filling great. It brought out the sweetness of the apples and onions, and added a great flavor of its own. It made the whole thing work.

Crust:
- I more or less followed this recipe: http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/001127perfect_pie_crust.php. As noted above, the flours were changed, and I halved the recipe to fit it into my mini food processor.
- My half recipe made enough dough for four of the pies (I used four smallish apples)
Filling:
Ingredients:
- Apples, peeled and roughly chopped
- Onions, halved and sliced pretty thinly
- Cardamom (crushed seeds)
- Sugar

- Butter
- Salt
Method:
- Melt butter in a pan
- Add sliced onions with some salt and sugar (not too much of either, I used a pinch of salt and about a teaspoon of sugar to a good handful of sliced onion
- Cook onions until soft and starting to caramelize
- Then add apples and a bit more salt and sugar, mixing everything well
- Once apples are softening, add cardamom
- Stir well again, and when everything is pretty soft turn off heat Pie/Tart
- I free formed the dough to hold the filling and put it into a 350 degree oven on a cast iron griddle (I'll use a pie tin if I make this again. As you can see, the dough collapsed)
- Once the crust was dry and the apples were just beginning to brown, I removed the pie

This tasted great, especially the filling. I'll experiment with the crusts more in the future. I don't think oak and spelt are the way to go here. The taste was great, and so was the color, but the texture was a bit too cookie-like.