What to cook for your PI: Tomates Farcies Two Ways

You are more likely to cook for colleagues in academia than in industry. Between your living wage and basic nutrition requirements, cooking can be the most practical gift a graduate student can offer. Follow these cooking tips to make a good impression on your PI:

1. Always use fresh ingredients and a recipe that calls for thorough cooking. Even if your PI is a microbiologist, she wont appreciate food poisoning. Leave your leftovers in the free-food area at work.
2. Make sure the dish isn't notoriously time consuming. No amount of hand-prepared fresh pasta using whole-wheat that you spent the last two years growing will impress a PI who gets a whiff of how much time you took off research to make it.
3. Choose a dish that pairs well with graduation. Hey... couldn't hurt.
4. Avoid store-bought prepared foods. Your PI is high class, even if he wears jeans with holes and sometimes sleeps on his office couch. Any dish that 'looks' home made is more respectable than guac and chips. Wine is an exception to this rule, and Two-Buck Chuck is an exception to that exception.

I'm joining my PI and his family for Thanksgiving later today, and I'm bringing a couple of Crustic Baguettes and Tomates Farcies Two Ways - a French stuffed tomato recipe. Before sharing the recipe below, here are some possible Autumn dishes that would also work well*:  Hasselback Potatoes (or anything with taters), Bread Pudding, Beet salad, or a nice bottle of Malbec.

Tomates Farcies Two Ways (12 servings, ~1 hour prep/cook time)

Ingredients
+ 12 Tomatoes (not too ripe)
+ 6 garlic cloves
+ 2 yellow onions
+ Parsley
+ Butter, Salt & Pepper
+ Splash of White Wine or Vermouth
+ Parmegiano Reggiano

Farce Type I (traditional)
+ Ground Beef
+ Bread crumbs

Farce Type II (vegetarian)
+ 1 Leek (chopped, dark green discarded)
+ 2 Bell Peppers (seeded, chopped)
+ Mushrooms, one basket
+ Dried Italian Herbs

Preparation
Wash your tomatoes (see above note about food poisoning). Cut the top off each tomato carefully; they will be the tomatoes' hats! Again, carefully remove the seeds using a spoon, but do not remove the meet on the tomato wall. Sweat the tomatoes by salting their insides and turning them over while preparing the next paragraph. Also, start preheating the oven to 460F, 260C.

For either Farce, start by blooming the onions in melted butter over a pot (with high walls, since we're adding lots of ingredients). Once translucent, add the seeds and let the juice evaporate, then add the garlic and parsley. Promptly start adding the ingredients in the order they are listed under each type of farce, waiting a couple minutes between each ingredient.  

Once the meat is cooked, or the veggies are softened, carefully stuff the tomatoes with the farce, adding enough to overflow slightly. Top them off with some Parmesan, add the hats, and throw them in a casserole dish, and throw that in the oven for twenty minutes. If possible, try to use a good looking casserole dish -- these tomatoes do NOT like being moved more than once. Enjoy.

Contributing Sources: La Tartine Gourmande, Vegetarian Cookery School, Petit Larousse de la Cuisine

*No, these are not all links to this blog. Sheesh.

Baguette Variations of the No Knead Bread: "Crustic Baguette"

Awhile ago I posted the link to the New York Time's no knead loaf. I've made this recipe dozens of times, and I still love it, but I think at this point my version has strayed significantly enough from the original that I can justify posting it here. Let's call it "Crustic Baguette" for now.

What are the main changes? I'm impatient, so I've removed the second rising time completely. Also, instead of making a rustic loaf using a dutch oven (which most of my friends do not have), the recipe now makes baguettes on a cookie sheet. Its faster and easier.

It's easy and a very forgiving recipe. Don't be discouraged if things get messy -- it will still taste delicious. Just don't forget the salt.

No Knead Baguette (makes two baguettes)

Ingredients
+ 3 cups all purpose unbleached flour
+ ¼ teaspoon yeast
+ 1¼ teaspoon salt*
+ 1 ¾ cups water

Preparation 
   The night before, dissolve the yeast in the water, and mix in the rest of the ingredients together in a bowl with a spoon until everything is incorporated. Then cover the bowl with a towel or plastic wrap, and leave it overnight.
   The next morning (at least eight hours later), it will have at least doubled in size and the surface will be dotted with bubbles. Using heavily floured surface and hands, get the dough out of the bowl and rip it in half. The surface of the dough should have enough flour not to be sticky, but try not to incorporate flour into the bread. As the name indicates, you should not knead the dough. Instead delicately shape each half into a long rod. I do this by gently squeezing, not pulling. Plop them on a cookie sheet (don't worry, doesn't need to be nonstick). The loaves will look kinda flat, but they'll rise in the oven.
   Preheat the stove to 450. Fill a loaf/cake pan or dutch over with water and put it on the bottom rack of the stove. By the time the oven is preheated, the water will be boiling, imitating the moist condition of professional baking ovens. Once the oven is preheated, score the baguettes with a knife, and throw them on the second rack of the oven. Bake for ~20-30 minutes, or until they look delicious. 

  * DO NOT CUT THE SALT: Literally every time I've made this recipe, I look at the amount of salt required and shake my head and think "No way that's way too much salt. I don't like as much salt as the average person. I'm watching my sodium intake. I can enjoy this bread with less salt. People have too much sodium in their diet, and I'm better than them. I'll just use half as much".  Then, lo and behold, the baguette just tastes of wet cardboard.

Hasselback Potatoes

Graduate school is a lot of work, but I've had the best time of my life since arriving at Stanford last September. I am still cooking tons, but there's been less time to post the recipes. Here's a short one on Hasselback Potatoes. They're basically potato chips glued at the base. It's not hard at all, and it's a crowd pleaser. I recommend using a smaller potato variant other than regular Russet potatoes for two reasons: since there are no garnishes, the potato's intrinsic taste & texture is going to feature prominently. Check out this cool site for potato varietal infographic. Second, other varietals tend to be smaller and hence cook more quickly.

Hasselback Potatoes

Ingredients

+ Potatoes (I used Yukon Gold potatoes, but red potatoes work well too)
+ Salt & Pepper
+ Olive Oil

Preparation

Preheat oven to 400F. Tape a chopstick or thin wooden spoon to a cutting board, as in the photo above. Start slicing the potato in thinly using long knife strokes (slice - don't chop). The chopstick will prevent you from chopping all the way through. 

Place potatoes directly on the baking sheet and add a drop of olive oil on top of each potato, along with a healthy amount of salt and pepper. At this point, its normal for the peels to stick together. As it cooks, the peels will separate as in the photos below. Cook them until they start to brown, about one hour (start checking at 45 minutes). 

I did about four small potatoes per person, and served it with a salad. It was plenty of food. 

Graduation and Beet Chips

I apologize for the hiatus from blogging, but I had to briefly graduate. My blog is not for naught, and its loose ends are not yet knotted. I'll still be cooking between class when I start my biophysics PhD at Stanford in another month.

Even though I'm not yet enrolled, here's a neat recipe. I had to use my mom's mandolin (the one she expressly forbade me using). It's nice having an equipped kitchen. Maybe the best part is being able to use two all-clad sauciers!

Anyway, I just came into a lot of beets. We're getting a bit bored of Beet and Potato soup, and these are a nice change - they taste great, and not too beety. Yum.

Beet Chips

Ingredients
+ Beets, peeled/rinsed
+ Salt (optional)

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350F. Slice the beets 1mm thin (I cut them 1 mm thicker, and they turned out a little soft). Do not slice your fingers - blood is difficult to discern from beet juice.

Lay out pieces on any kind of baking tray. Sprinkle salt if desired. Bake for 15-20 minutes, keeping an eye after 15. Remove and let harden/cool. Eat.

Source: Fix Me A Snack

(click for high resolution)

Your taste in music.

Here's a quatrain I wrote while coming up with something to write about:

The sound of music, the taste of food
Help find my lyric, help change your mood.
Follow the metric, its not poetic,
but a recipe that serves two.

Now here's a cover by a band called "Cibo Matto". You should listen to it while reading the rest of this post.

Cibo Matto (meaning crazy food in Italian) ... are a New York City-based band formed by two Japanese women, Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, in 1994. The lyrics in their songs are primarily concerned with food and their sound has been described as a combination of "Jazz, Hip-Hop, Brazilian music, African Drumming, and Disco samples". -Wikipedia June 2011

Do I have any choice about liking this band? Do you?

Now here's a recipe that I am making tonight, credit my dad.

Smoked Salmon Spaghetti

Ingredients
+ One pound spaghetti
+ Heavy Cream
+ Salt, Pepper
+ Shallots
+ One tablespoon butter
+ ~4oz Smokes Salmon, wild like the wind.

Preparation
Cook Pasta.

In another pan, bloom the diced shallots in the butter. Add the heavy cream.

Do not add the salmon.

Add cream mixture to cooked/drained pasta. Now add smoked salmon. Salt/Pepper to taste. Serve.

Beet Generation

"Ah Sal you are all right.", said Remi Boncoer as Dean and I walked into his house. He patted me on the back, and avoided eye contact with Dean, who looked hurt, but only for a second. His expression was replaced by swaying and longing for the last fifteen dollars we spent at the bar that night.

Lee Ann came around the corner from the kitchen. She saw Dean and halted and sped backwards back into the kitchen. Remi glared a Dean and followed her into the kitchen. They began arguing in whispers, but not quietly so I could hear everything and so could Dean. I looked back at him and his eyes returned to normal. He rubbed his belly and sweat was beading on his sunken cheeks. He paid no attention to the hisses around the corner.

Dean walked over to the set table, talking on the way "My pa made this for me, back in Denver." The idea that his wino father ever cooked anything surprised me. I thought of boyhood Dean kneeling over the trashcan fire in an alley of Larimer street, hiding from the rain under his father's coat. I was so tired and broken, so beat that I couldn't think of anything else.

My eyes must have glazed over because Dean walked towards me and stopped when his face was only a few inches from my face and he yelled with a full mouth, "Try this - you have to!". Remi's French accent was still audible two rooms away now, and I knew I would have time to try some without him noticing. Using two fingers so as to not make a mess I tried one of the red cubes. The taste reminded me of dirt, or earth, but it was also tart, and it was such a beautiful color. It was the first real food I had eaten in two days.

"What is it?" I asked and sneaked another piece, but Dean was already gone. I heard his footsteps walking towards Remi and Lee Ann and his booming voice "Hey Lee Ann! My pa made this all the time! Lee Ann! How do you make it? Lee Ann!"

It took longer than I thought to find the kitchen, since the floor was moving from the booze. I sat down on a chair by the door and must have passed out for a second, since by the time I caught up to Dean and Remi and Lee Ann they were all quiet and leaning on the counter. There was blood on Dean's hands - he was peeling beets and cubing them. Remi saw me walk in but said nothing and turned his gaze back to the cutting board. It wasn't blood as I thought; it was the juice from the beets.

Lee Ann was dictating her recipe: "Not so big, or they wont cook. Okay now just add olive oil and salt and put them in the ov-" but she couldn't finish because Dean had left the room and we heard the front door slam. I had found a chair by now and we had nothing to say to each other, but Remi looked happy staring at Lee Ann.

Dean walked back in with the bottle of Chablis wine from the car that we couldn't bring ourselves to finish and forgot in the trunk. It had been open for months. He uncorked it and the entire kitchen smelled like rotting vinegar and before Lee Ann could protest he poured a little on the Beets. "My pa did this I remember because he said he never wanted to waste the wine, even when it was bad."

I was happy the oven was already on, and Dean opened it and the gust of warm air made me shiver more than anyone else has ever shivered in San Francisco. He singed his arm hairs putting the beets in the very back of the oven - it must have been hundreds of degrees hot. I began feeling feverish and I fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up at noon and I felt alright, and Dean and Lee Ann seemed to be getting along. He made the beets again that night and I tried some again and he was right it tasted delicious and we talked about starting a beet farm. Dean's hands were permanently stained red. At the end of the second day in San Francisco, Remi was concerned that he was getting old and Dean spent two hours talking about how excited he was about life and the things he was going to do.

Later that night Remi caught Dean trying to make with his girl. Lee Ann was not that kind of girl but it didn't matter, Dean's hands were red. I never saw Remi that mad and he told us to leave his house, even though it was Lee Ann's house. I told him I would come back without Dean but it Remi said he didn't want me to. We never unpacked the Buick so we got back in and started driving. The car was really quiet and Dean knew I was angry so he said "Now Sal, Lee Ann was the one who started it. I was trying to get her to stop but you know I miss Denver and anyway we were out of Chablis. There was no reason to stay without those beets." He started rubbing his belly and driving with his knees. We were driving back to Denver.

Cook Pasta as Risotto : Asparagus Pastotto

So there's been a recent interest going around about cooking pasta as one would risotto. I first read this advice in this season's Cook's Illustrated, but apparently it was also written in the NYT recently. In both places, it was just a two-sentence snippet with no recipe to back it up. Was this just another far-fetched excuse to add (even more) butter to pasta, or a treasonous disfigurement of Italian culture?

So I took the advice to its fullest meaning - after finding a suitable recipe for Asparagus Risotto (from NYT), I added a sprinkle of Ctrl-f Ctrl-v, I had myself a de-bonafide Pasta-Risotto recipe.

A quick google search confirms that I am not the first to test this recipe, or to coin "Pastotto". Still this recipe came out pretty darn delicious, and I hope you give it a try! I added at least one family secret, and tested the dish's robustness as left-overs.

Asparagus Pastatto

Ingredients
+ One bunch Asparagus (it's in season!), cut into 1-inch pieces
+ Chicken or Vegetable Stock - 4 cups
+ One pound of your favorite pasta - I used Fusilli
+ Splash of white wine - I used Pancake Cellars 'Big Day White'
+ Two tablespoons butter
+ One Onion, diced
+ Salt and Parmigiano-Reggiano to taste

Preparation
Add the stock to a small pot and keep it warm under low heat.

Boil half the asparagus for five minutes in two cups of water. Drain the green water into the warming stock pot. Blend the boiled asparagus with a food processor, blender, or hand blender. Set aside.

Melt half the butter in a large pan with rounded edges and high walls. Once the butter has stopped bubbling, add the onion and let it soften, five minutes. Add the pasta and coat it as evenly as possible with the butter and onion, for two minutes.

Add a splash (half cup or so) of white wine and let it boil away while constantly stirring. Don't forget to pour yourself some wine to drink slowly throughout the cooking process.

Now, start adding about the broth a cup at a time. Also add the other half of the uncooked asparagus, as well as the pureed asparagus. Continue in this fashion until the pasta is cooked - watch out! Pasta takes significantly less time to absorb the water and finish cooking - it took me about an hour.

Finally, once the pasta is tender, add a half cup of grated Parmesan, another tablespoon of butter, and cover the pot. Do not touch the pot for five minutes.

Uncover, mix thoroughly, and serve immediately.

Pastotto Pancakes

As leftovers, you can always panfry your risotto/pastotto with a little butter. The pasta does not hold together as well as risotto traditionally does, but it's still quite tasty.

Here is the finished product. Enjoy!