Grannies Mac

One of the (many) things we miss about Brooklyn is the long list of restaurants for which we developed tremendous affection during our five years of NYC living. There are so many things to love about living in Raleigh, but a broad range of fantastic, cozy, well-priced and personal dining spaces is not one of them. Among our very favorites is the Chip Shop on Atlantic between Henry and Clinton, where one can find what many (many!) would deem the best fish and chips in the city. My brother once noted that he was nervous for our health given the frequency with which we visited the Chip Shop during the winter months, but truly, you do enough walking in NYC to offset the occasional visit to battered-and-deep-fried fish heaven.

In addition to the fish and chips, the Chip Shop was baking up macaroni and cheese long before there was a "fancy mac" bandwagon to jump on. One of my absolute favorites is the Grannies Mac, a mixture of macaroni and sharp cheese and bechamel sauce and sausage and peas. It is one of the best things to eat on a really cold evening and made every step of our mile-long walk to the restaurant totally worth it.

During our first winter out of Brooklyn, I dreamed of Grannies Mac regularly and embarked on a quest to recreate it, as best I could. I quickly discovered that macaroni and cheese comes in a variety of forms, from the types of cheese used to the supporting ingredients to the final form (be it custard, casserole, or the more soupy style). Luckily, I discovered Martha Stewart's creamy macaroni and cheese recipe after a few missteps, which uses a bechamel base and extra sharp cheese to yield a glorious casserole of macaroni goodness. Fold in some sauteed sausage and peas and voila, I am as close to Grannies Mac as I am going to get this side of the New York Bay.

(quick disclaimer - I realize that this recipe requires a little more work than usual, but it yields a huge amount of mac & cheese, which makes it a one-dish dinner that keeps on giving.

It freezes and reheats beautifully, as well!)

*GRANNIES MAC*

Yields one 3.5-quart casserole, adapted from Deb Perelman's (Smitten Kitchen) adaptation from Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The Original Classics.

Ingredients

1 pound smoked beef sausage, cut into 1" half-pieces

8 ounces frozen peas

1 pound elbow macaroni

3 T butter

2 3/4 cups milk

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

1 t coarse salt

1/4 t ground nutmeg

1/4 t black pepper

1/4 t cayenne pepper

3 1/2 cups grated extra-sharp cheddar cheese (I used a mixture of white and yellow)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Butter a 3.5-quart casserole dish and set aside. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and cook macaroni until slightly underdone; drain and set aside in a large mixing bowl. Brown sausage in a skillet until slightly charred and crispy; drain and add to the bowl with the pasta and stir to combine.

In the same pot used to boil the noodles, melt the 3 T of butter over medium heat until bubbly. Add the flour and whisk for one minute, allowing the butter to brown slightly. While continuing to whisk, add the milk slowly, a half-cup at a time, allowing the mixture to remain smooth. Continue cooking and whisking until the mixture becomes thick and bubbly, about 8 to 10 minutes. You now have your bechamel sauce, the principal foundation for the cheese sauce.

Remove the pan from the heat and actively stir in the nutmeg, black pepper, cayenne and 2 1/2 cups of cheese. Pour the cheese sauce into the large mixing bowl with the pasta and sausage, adding the frozen peas as well. Stir to combine all ingredients and transfer to the prepared baking dish. Sprinkle the remaining 1 cup of cheese atop the dish and bake until golden brown and bubbly, about 30-35 minutes. Allow dish to cool slightly before serving. Whip up a green salad and enjoy! (We are particularly fond of the Chip Shop's mixed green salad tossed with Granny Smith green apples, walnuts, gorgonzola cheese and basalmic dressing.)

Oatmeal Bread, Redone and Done Right

In case it did not come across convincingly in my original post about oatmeal bread back in January, I was not a big fan of the recipe I used for my first attempt at what is one of my favorite types of bread. As I noted back then, we eat *a lot* of peanut butter in our house and we've found that oatmeal bread is the perfect platform for a proper peanut butter and honey sandwich. The loaf I baked up in January, however, was not doing it for me. It was slightly dry, the crust was way too dark, and it didn't have that slightly-sweet flavor that I'm used to encountering in a proper loaf of oatmeal bread.

Thank goodness for second chances, or rather, different recipes. Buried in the same cookbook as the first recipe was one for sunflower oatmeal bread, which took the same basic ingredients of buttermilk, maple syrup, oats and bread flour and added honey, an egg, water and sunflowers. Cooked on the lightest crust setting, the recipe yielded the *exact* loaf that I had hoped for the first time around.

The bread was so tasty that I was inspired to take it beyond the basic PB&H and whipped up some mustard seed egg salad with fresh sprouts for a delicious sandwich.

*SUNFLOWER OATMEAL BREAD* Recipe from Beth Hensperger
Yields one 1.5 pound loaf

Ingredients

1/2 cup water

5/8 cup buttermilk

1 large egg

1.5 T butter, cut into small cubes

2 T honey

1 T maple syrup

2 1/2 cups bread flour

1/2 cup rolled oats

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1 T gluten

1 1/2 t salt

2 t yeast

1/2 cup raw sunflowers, unsalted

Combine all ingredients, in the order listed, and bake on the basic bread cycle, programmed for a light crust. Simple as that, and delish!

Short-Cut Spaghetti and Meatballs

Home-cooked marinara sauce is divine, built from a combination of fresh tomatoes, onions, carrots, celery, garlic and spices that are slowly sauteed, simmered and pureed, and then simmered further until the flavor profile achieves the exact balance of tart and sweet. Making home-cooked marinara sauce, however, is an activity that few of us have time for more than a few times a year.

Prepared pasta sauces offer a wonderful alternative, but not all marinaras are equal. Yes, the $2.29 jarred sauce seems like a great value, but I promise you that the flavor is about one-tenth of that found among the slightly more expensive options. Your marinara sauce should not resemble a bright-red chunky salsa. However, I find time and again that the cheaper marinara sauces walk this line. If I'm baking a layered Italian dish like eggplant parm or lasagna that also includes cheese, meat, or other flavor-rich ingredients, I'll consider using a less-expensive variety because I know that there will be a lot of competing flavors in the dish, but when a pasta dish calls for a basic marinara that must stand on its own, I shell out a few more dollars for the higher-quality product offered from labels like Rao's and Lucini Italia (among many in this category).

With a quality store-bought marinara sauce and some spaghetti noodles in hand (and here I will vouch for Trader Joe's dried pasta, which is both affordable and of great construction when cooked al dente), I can focus all of my effort on the feature piece - the meatballs. For the most part, we've cooked our meatballs the traditional way, browned in a skillet and then finished in the oven. However, cooking ground beef in a skillet is messy business, and if you don't have a skillet that transfers well to the oven, you can end up using multiple dishes to complete one piece of your dinner, making clean-up even more laborious than usual.

Looking for an alternative, I recently discovered a meatball recipe that is cooked on a nonstick wire rack in the oven. The meatballs were quick to assemble, they cooked beautifully in the oven, they yielded little mess, and they offered a complexity of flavors that included garlic, parmesan, capers and sage. Now that I've discovered the wire-rack cooking method, I'm not sure I'll ever go back!

*OVEN-ROASTED BEEF MEATBALLS* (adapted from Rachael Ray's 30 Minute Meals)
yields 12-16 large meatballs

Ingredients

1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef (90% lean or higher)

1 medium sweet onion, grated

4 cloves garlic, chopped

1 egg

1/2 cup Italian bread crumbs

1/2 cup grated parmesan

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

3 tablespoons capers, drained and chopped

2 tablespoons chopped sage leaves, 4 to 6 sprigs

A generous handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped

Salt and pepper, to taste


Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a jelly roll pan with foil and place a nonstick wire rack (often called a cooling rack) on top of the pan so that juices from the meatballs can drip onto the foil while cooking. 


In a large bowl, combine all ingredients along with a generous drizzle of olive oil. Mix the meat and form into a large ball at base of bowl. Score into four sections and divide each section into three or four meatballs, depending on preferred size. Place meatballs on wire rack and roast for 15 minutes, until firm but not hard. Serve over spaghetti noodles smothered in marinara sauce.

Beer Bread is the Best!

Seriously, if you have a bread maker, you need to do yourself a favor and bake up a loaf of this beer bread right now. It is that good, and ridiculously easy to assemble. Considering that beer and bread share many of the same basic ingredients (grain, yeast and water), it makes perfect sense that the former would elevate the latter. Just a few simple ingredients yield a loaf of dense, soft, slightly-sweet bread that is the perfect platform for softened butter and preserves or your favorite lunch fixings.

I used an ale in the Berliner Weissbier style, which is a wheat ale with citrus notes and a low alcohol content (4%). My beer selection was less a purposeful pursuit of a specific flavor profile, and more a matter of what was already in the fridge, but it worked remarkably well. Interestingly, I wasn't very keen on the beer as a stand-alone, but in the form of bread, it was divine. The recipe advised against using a porter or stout style ale, but I imagine that anything along the lighter side, from a lager to a pale ale, would yield delicious results. I can't wait to bake up another loaf!

*BEER BREAD*
Yields one 1.5-pound loaf

Ingredients

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup beer

1 t salt

1 T sugar

3 cups bread flour

2 t yeast

Assemble ingredients in the bread machine, in the order listed, taking care to keep the yeast separate from the wet ingredients. Select the basic/white bread cycle with a light crust setting. Remove the loaf upon completion of the baking cycle and slice while still slightly warm. Bread keeps well for many days when stored in an air-tight container.

Roasted Chicken & Artichokes

Simplicity in cooking is not a trade off for complexity in flavor. I find that many recipes that promote ease and efficiency also lack dimension and freshness. The short-cut / semi-homemade approach to cooking can be a huge time saver, but the canned, boxed and frozen elements often dominate the list of ingredients and overwhelm the flavor of the few fresh components. I absolutely think that semi-homemade cooking has its place on the weekly dinner roster, but I also think that you can achieve simplicity in the kitchen through the *right* combination of prepackaged and fresh ingredients. In my book, the trick is to be sure that your recipe includes more fresh foods than canned, boxed and frozen goods. Take the short-cuts where you can, but keep the primary flavors coming from the fresh side of the grocery aisle.

And on the topic of short-cuts, I am a huge fan of one-dish dinners. Such a fan, in fact, that I intend to make it one of the many points of focus of this weblog. We're evolving! To kick things off on the one-dish meal front, and to bring things back to the short-cut cooking side of things, I was thrilled to find this one-dish meal of roasted chicken and artichokes. A whole chicken (sectioned) and fresh sweet bell peppers are combined with canned artichoke hearts and jarred green olives for an incredibly easy and remarkably robust dinner. One kitchen time-saver: use whole peeled garlic cloves and whole peeled shallots from your grocer in lieu of bulk items.

*ROASTED CHICKEN & ARTICHOKES* (adapted from Martha Stewart Living, April 2002)
Yields 6 servings
Ingredients
One whole chicken, cut into serving pieces
Coarse salt and ground pepper, to taste
3 T olive oil
1 lemon
6 large garlic cloves
6 large shallots, peeled and halved
2 sweet bell peppers (red, yellow or orange), seeded and cut into large strips
2 cans whole artichoke hearts
1 cup dry white wine
1 cup large green olives, pitted

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Season chicken with salt and pepper and rub with one tablespoon olive oil. Place chicken in a large, shallow roasting pan and set aside. With a vegetable peeler, zest lemon into long strips and squeeze juice from lemon into a small bowl.

In a medium bowl, combine lemon zest, garlic, shallots, bell peppers, and artichoke hearts with two tablespoons olive oil and salt and pepper, to taste. Arrange mixture around chicken in roasting pan and roast until chicken is brown, about 40 minutes.

Remove roasting pan from oven and add reserved lemon juice along with white wine and green olives, stirring slightly. Return to oven for an additional 10 to 15 minutes, until liquid thickens slightly.  Remove from oven and serve hot. Delish!

Slow-Cooker Beef Stew

We have had an incredibly mild winter to date, with not even a dusting of snow, so my typical meals of turkey chili, chicken pot pie, and lasagna have not taken their usual place in the dinner rotation. However, winter finally made its mark here this past weekend, when the chilly winds and below-freezing temperatures encouraged us to keep the fire place burning and inspired some hearty beef stew in the slow cooker.

Here's the thing about cooking chicken, beef, or pork in the slow cooker: the recipes that require some work beforehand are often the ones that yield the best results. Yes, slow cookers are designed to make cooking less laborious and more convenient, but slow heat will not deliver the same results as a skillet or a high-heat oven. When slow-cooking a dish for which you want the meat to fall apart, such as shredded pork shoulder for barbeque rolls or green-chile chicken for enchiladas, the slow cooker can be your best friend. However, when slow-cooking a dish like chicken wings, for which you want the meat to stay on the bone, you may end up with a bowl full of meat and bones (as happened to me a few weeks ago).

How to solve this slow-cooker problem? Brown the meat beforehand, of course! Yes, it requires a little extra work, but the outcome truly is worth it. Peruse the comments section of most slow-cooker recipes online and you'll find a chorus of voices on the topic. I am so convinced that a little extra work outside of the cooker yields better results in the cooker that I have become weary of recipes that require nothing more than tossing a medley of raw meat, a seasoning packet, and other ingredients into the cooker and pressing "start" (again, pork shoulder being one notable exception).

So, onto the beef stew. The beauty of beef stew (which I admittedly prepare only once or twice a year) is that you can make it your own by adding a broad variety of vegetables, from the standard carrots and yukon gold potatoes to the more seasonal parsnips and rutabaga. For this go-round, I used a mix of small purple, red and gold potatoes, baby carrots, and pearl onions. I had every intention of including peas, which are added at the end of the hours-long cooking cycle, but it skipped my mind in the moment. Yes, I browned the meat beforehand, and I think it made all the difference.

*SLOW-COOKER BEEF STEW* (adapted from Real Simple)
Yields 4-6 servings
Ingredients
2 pounds bottom round, trimmed and cut into 2-inch pieces
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup olive oil
3 ounces tomato paste
1 cup red wine
2 cups beef broth
1 pound small potatoes
1/2 pound baby carrots
1/2 pound pearl onions
3/4 cup frozen peas, defrosted
1 T each: dried basil & oregano (or a bouquet of fresh oregano & thyme, tied with cooking twine)
1-2 bay leaves
Salt & pepper

Season the beef cuts with salt and pepper; place into a large ziploc bag with the flour. Close the bag and shake to fully cover beef with flour. Prepare a medium-hot skillet with olive oil and add the beef to the pan, making sure to brown all four sides of each piece and adding more oil if necessary. When browned, transfer the beef to the slow cooker. Reduce skillet heat slightly and add tomato paste and red wine to the pan, stirring first to combine and then to deglaze the pan of any remaining flour coating. Transfer skillet contents to the slow cooker and remove from heat.

To the slow cooker, add the beef broth, vegetables and spices, plus salt and pepper to taste. Stir gently to combine, cover, and cook on high heat for four (4) hours or low heat for seven (7) hours. When the cooking cycle ends, remove the bay leaves and herb bouquet (if used) and stir in the peas until heated through. Serve in a big bowl on a chilly winter night!

Cinnamon Raisin Bread

Cinnamon raisin bread is one of our favorite breakfast foods. We eat it soft, toasted, plain, buttered, and every type of preparation in between. Conquering the bread machine version of this beloved loaf is a high priority for me and I was pretty excited about the outcome the first time around. I'll probably continue to tweak it and explore other versions, but the first time was a charm! Also, how can you not love a dough that has a surprise smiley face hidden inside the first slice?!

This was my first time working with a dough that had to be removed from and then returned to the machine prior to the baking cycle. The dough was incredibly easy to work with outside of the pan, and rolling it back together was a cinch.

*CINNAMON RAISIN SWIRL BREAD*
Yields one (1) one-pound loaf
Ingredients
3/4 cup milk, room temperature
1 1/2 T butter, cut into half-inch pieces
1 large egg, room temperature
1/2 t salt
1 T granulated sugar
2 1/2 cups bread flour
1 3/4 t yeast
For the topping: 3 T sugar, 1/2 T cinnamon, 1 cup raisins

Combine all ingredients, in the order listed above, in the bread machine, making sure to keep wet ingredients separate from the yeast (added last). Program the bread machine for the 1-pound basic/white cycle on the medium crust setting. Start the machine and allow it to proceed through the mix, knead and initial rise cycles. When the bread machine signals to remove the kneading paddle, turn the dough out onto a flat, lightly floured surface. Roll the dough out into a rectangle between 1/4 and 1/2 inch thick. Sprinkle the sugar and cinnamon topping onto the dough and cover with raisins. Roll the dough into a tight cylinder beginning with the shorter side, making sure that the ends are tucked in and sealed. Place the dough back into the pan (with kneading paddle removed) and allow machine to proceed through the final rise and bake cycles. When baking is complete, remove immediately and cool on a wire rack. Slice and serve any time of day!