“What is that?”, you may ask. It’s the term I coined this weekend when trying to find a recipe. It’s when it’s too late in the summer to get enough flavor from the stone fruit and berries, so you don’t really want to use them in your baking. But it’s still too early for all the “fall bakes:” things like pumpkin, apple, cinnamon, and ginger. These things are inching their way towards the spotlight, but not quite yet. Plus I can’t bring myself to bake something pumpkin-related until at least after Labor Day.
This recipe can be found in How Easy is That?, page 195.
Even though Salmon with Melting Tomatoes had a built-in side dish, I still needed one more thing to truly round out the meal. Enter: Couscous with Toasted Pine Nuts.
I still had some pine nuts from when I made gremolata a few weeks back. At least that’s where I think I used the pine nuts originally. I can’t really remember. So many recipes. But I wanted to use them up since I didn’t really know how long they would “keep.” I was storing them in the fridge since they are nuts, after all. And since nuts have oil, they can spoil! (Thanks Rachael Ray)
Luckily this recipe used them all up. Sadly, I will have to buy them again at some point and fork over almost $10 for like 5 ounces of nuts. But that’s a story for another time.
This recipe can be found in Barefoot Contessa How Easy Is That? on page 120.
Last Friday, I took over the dinner duty, as usual. This week I made a lovely chicken dish and a side of vegetables to go along with it.
The main course was Lemon Chicken Breasts. While the recipe calls for boneless chicken breasts with the skin on, I wasn’t able to find that. So I just used the more-common boneless, skinless chicken breasts. The breasts did not develop a beautiful golden-brown color on top like the recipe photograph shows, but they were still tasty nonetheless.
The recipe is heavy on the lemon. Lemon juice and zest is used in the sauce that the breasts bake in, but I don’t feel the use of lemon was overpowering. It adds a wonderful, fresh, citrusy flavor the dish. This was perfect for a cold winter’s night since I often find myself longing for the warmer days of summer.
This dish is easy enough to make for a weeknight since it can be completed in around 40 minutes from start to finish. Although, I do feel that letting the chicken rest after taking it out of the oven is essential to prevent the meat from being too dry. But that aside, this is a fast and easy weeknight dinner, which is unusual for Ina. Long time readers of this blog will recall that I have found some of her recipes time-consuming.
The vegetable dish I served with this will be reviewed tomorrow.
Stay tuned!
You can see from the photo above that the vegetable dish was a broccoli one. I wasn’t able to take a separate photograph.
In the headnotes to the recipe, Ina says (and I’m paraphrasing) that everyone needs a quick, easy, and flavorful sauce recipe. And after trying her Weeknight Bolognese I think I’ve found it!
This recipe was super simple. It reminded me of the “old Ina” (which is the Ina I knew and loved before I started this blog) meaning that I always found her recipes to be easy. This sauce recipe came together in a little over 30 minutes but it tastes as though it cooked all day. It also seems adaptable enough to increase the amount made or to omit the beef to make a true marinara-style sauce.
The flavor in this recipe is the real hidden secret.
There are so many layers of flavor in this sauce. I never thought nutmeg in an Italian sauce would taste so good. That is just one of many different flavors. Since I did not have crushed red pepper flakes, I did a quick Google search to try to find something else. I substituted chili powder and I think it only intensified the flavor. Red pepper flakes aside, this recipes uses a lot of black pepper. Which seems to be a theme in Ina’s savory recipes.
Add in some heavy cream, oregano, basil leaves, and red wine and this sauce will surely be a winner for you as well!
I think this one needs to go on the Favorites Lists!
Excuse the messy bowl. This was taken right before I sat down for my second helping! Yes, I forgot to take one before eating my first serving…..forgive me. I’m trying to remember to take them and make them look halfway decent!
For my next recipe, I decided to make another dessert.
As you may recall, I purchased a tart pan from Williams-Sonoma last week and I decided that it was time to break it in! By the way, this recipe was made on Saturday morning, so I didn’t wait very long to give it it’s first use!
Ina has many tarts sprinkled throughout her cookbooks. Some of them are savory, but most are sweet, desserts. However, I wanted chocolate! So I found the Chocolate Pudding Cream Tart inside the How Easy Is That? cookbook. I gathered my ingredients and everything was going to plan, until one step…..
The recipe requires that you combine the scalded milk with the egg mixture in your stand mixture. Which went swimmingly: I poured the milk in slowly and had the mixer on stir so it wouldn’t scramble the eggs, which it didn’t. However, after doing that, Ina says you need to cook the mixture over the stove until it thickens. Her recipe says cook it for 5 to 10 minutes.
Well…I cooked it. But after 8 minutes on the stove with constant stirring, it had thickened a bit so I thought it was ready. I removed it from the heat and continued on with the recipe by adding the chocolate and butter and whisking until it turned into a nice chocolate-y pool of goodness!
(Or so I thought)
I then poured the mixture into the prepared tart pan with its cooked graham cracker shell, put the plastic wrap on it, and shoved it in the fridge to cool/harden. After about an hour, I checked on it and it was still pretty liquidy, but Ina says it will take around six hours to completing become pudding consistently so I didn’t worry too much.
However, when it reached Hour 5 and not much had changed I did begin to worry!
I didn’t want chocolate milk and I didn’t want to lose the whole thing, so I placed the tart pan in the freezer for the final hour.
It did freeze, but when I cut into it about 90 minutes later, I realized my problem. The custard didn’t cook long enough and thus thicken properly. I was so disappointed that this one didn’t work out. I was really hoping that my first experience making a tart would be a success.
Also, it was the first recipe that I was failed by Ina, I feel like. Prior to starting this blog, I made a few of her recipes here and there and everything always came out amazingly. But not this time. While I know this isn’t technically Ina’s fault, I am still disappointed. I think I am more disappointed over the fact that I feel like I have failed Ina.
However, I wanted this recipe to be good and turn out okay, so I’ve decided I’m going to make it again at some point. In fact, I already bought the chocolate. I just need to get the whole milk, which is a necessity when making this since anything but whole milk won’t cook and set properly.
So there you have it! My first “fail.”
But I plan to march onward and try again and continue to make more recipes. After all, this experience is so that I could learn something, after all!
