French Fridays: Hachis Parmentier

Real French peasant food. You may feel the need to toil in the feels before sitting down to this one.

Hachis Parmentier ( pronounced: ah she isss Pah ment eee ay) is the French version of shepards pie. Of course its classed up with the addition of sausages, beef brewed in bouillion, and a generous helping of whatever cheese you may have ripening (it would not be like the French to leave out the cheese!)
 I made this for Sunday dinner, (even though it was just the two of us, and yes, I did eat it all week long for lunches). After a chilly day with the windows open, cleaning house and tilling up all the weeds in the flower bed just outside my kitchen door (next years vegetable garden?) this was such a welcome end to the day.

Dorie calls for you to boil cube steak in water with vegetables, I went one step further and boiled in some beef stock and a cup of red wine I had leftover from cleaning out the pantry and freezer. Hot Italian sausage was added for a little zip, and I kept the carrots I boiled the beef with in the mix. I topped the potatoes off with cheddar, and while I wish I'd used a ricer, (per Dorie's suggestion) there is no room in my life (or my kitchen) for another appliance right now. Dorie's recipes are always a hit with the man, and this one certainly delivers.

While we aren't normally beef eaters, this is a hearty and inexpensive meal that lasts and lasts. By laying some spinach between the meat mixture and the potatoes, and keeping the carrots, you still get some vegetable goodness in there. We served our hachis parmentier with some steamed whole green beans, and a zinfandel. It was a lovely (if huge) Sunday (dinner for two).  

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Quick Bite Dinners

Or, how to make dinner in 20 minutes.

The other night I got home late, and had to be out the door again in 40 minutes for an appointment. I was (characteristically) ready to eat my own arm off, and in need of something filling and delicious (and maybe just a bit spicy?) but most more importantly I needed it fast. I threw a 'take and bake' frozen baguette in the oven and opened the fridge. Enter spicy pork sausages, conveniently thawed in my fridge (and intended for a different meal).

In our pantry, there are about ten different varieties of canned or dried beans, french lentils, rice noodles, wheat pasta and enough vinegars and sauce bottles to make your brain explode. Come over and look in our fridge, nine times out of ten, its very nearly empty (except for the crisper drawers) but the door is completely fulll of condiments, we have a mustard addiction. On this particular evening I reached for some cannellini beans, remembering some sort of stew recipe I had read from about thirty different sources. In fact, you see incarnations of this stew all over the internet, mostly with chicken sausage and escarole to make it 'South Beach Diet' friendly, but the only chicken sausages that our grocery store sells are heavily processed, par-boiled and give off a slightly chemical aroma. I'll take the pork fat over that any day, thankyouverymuch.  So this is my short-cut version of the same idea, I got it on the table in 20 minutes, from fridge door to plate, including chopping a shallot and half a bell pepper. These veggies cook down, so if its not your most beautiful, regular dice, noone will notice...and if they do, and have the audacity to say anythng, then why are you feeding them?

This was delicious with a hunk of bread, a big salad (extra points if you can get the man to chop the salad while you make the stew,) and a grating of Romano. In the end I was full, and I had time to spare. We don't really have a rotation of regular meals in our house, (except of course for Melissa Clark's shrimp with broccoli, making a regular appearance), but I'm sure this is a dinner that we'll build on or return to a few times this winter.

Super Fast Spicy Sausage & Cannelini 'Stew'

Serves four, or two for dinner with lunches left over

3 hot sausages, removed from their casing

1 can of cannellini beans

1 pint jar of tomato sauce (i used some leftover sauce in our fridge,)

1 medium shallot, diced

1/2 bell pepper, diced

2 plum tomatoes, seeded and diced

1 Tablespoon dried Italian herbs

2 Tablespoons of olive oil

fresh basil and grated Romano cheese to taste

Heat a medium skillet over medium heat and add oil. Add the sausage and stir to break up to a medium 'crumble' brown the pieces ligtly and remove from the pan. Add the shallot and pepper and cook, stirring frequently until the onion is softened. add the tomato and return the sausage to the pan, add the tomato sauce, and dried herbs, check for seasoning and add salt and pepper if desired. If you find it gets too sticky, reduce the heat slightly and add some chicken stock, veggie broth, or water.

Serve with a genrous garnish of basil and Romano, alongside a green salad and some warm
bread.

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Arugula Pesto Pasta and the MBTA

The other night after a particularly hellish 2-hour delay on my commute courtesy of the MBTA, I finally arrived home at almost 8pm starving, cranky, and generally full of rainbows. Thankfully I had the presence of mind (psychic powers?) before boarding the train to pick up a magazine. Since I avidly read Last Night's Dinner, (cooking her way through Melissa Clark's 'No Sweat' feature,) I decided to give Rachael Ray's August magazine a try. Sometime around when they were evacuating the train one stop before mine, I found dinner in its pages.

We had a rather large handful (handfuls?) of arugula left over from the salad the other night, and I scored some basil and a smallish tomato from the garden of a family member (cat sitting and plant watering has its perks!) In our fridge there were a few slices of capicola, which took the place of the bacon, after a slice and a turn in a hot pan.

I made a half batch of the sauce, because we were low on arugula, and subbed in some Romano cheese for the Parmesan, (it's a personal preference thing, go with your gut on it). I made mine a bit thinner with pasta water, due to the fact that I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing, but it came out tasty anyway.

The sauce went over some wheat pasta. Shells, because that was what was hanging around the pantry at eye level when the water was boiled. The capicola was sprinkled on top, after it got just a bit crispy around the edges. I ignored the asparagus, because the man hates asparagus, (don't even get him started on swiss chard, because that is not to come within 5 feet of him) and I swapped out the fresh ricotta for a quick tomato salad (chunk tomatoes, mix with torn herbs - parsley, rosemary, and basil in this case, and drizzle with oil and vinegar ) which I sat directly on top of my steamy pasta. This particular version of pesto is a definite hit, around here because the arugula has a pleasant bite and freshness that knocks the basil back a bit. I was left wishing that I had made more pesto to stick in a jar and eat later (maybe with a spoon).

Yesterday, sick of shooting from the hip at dinner time I trudged to the grocery store. Check in later this week for something (hopefully) really delicious.

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What To Eat While Camping In Bear Country

I went against the grain this weekend, skipped the farmers market (this is the second time I've missed it all summer, I'm seriously considering taking a half day this week to hit another one) in order to camp and shoot some 'antique' rifles in Northern NH. I'm not usually a camper, target shooter or a sleep-on-the-ground-in-bear-country-during-black-bear-season kind of a girl, but this was so much unplanned and unexpected fun. Unplanned being the key term, as we didnt even pack until 9am the day we were leaving, and I didnt pack any food. That would be up to our host, my brother.

I have never camped with my brother. His favorite food is kielbasa, and he inhales pizza flavored Doritos at an almost inconceivable pace, considering his thin frame. So what did I eat while in his care? I ate hamburgers, made only of hamburger, not even salt and pepper. I ate sausage. I ate beans cooked inside their can over a fire. I ate white toast. I drank cheap beer and my own weight in bottled water. (a mistake when you have no toilets, I learned,). I cooked everything over a campfire with nothing but an old grill grate and a pocket knife. I felt like a pioneer woman. -Like a pioneer woman in a covered wagon, not an uber successful blogger.

The only thing I can say about this trip that might set anyone aflame with culinary jealousy is that I sat on the tailgate of a pick up truck and road down a grass path, picking raspberries and blackberries and shoving them into my mouth as we drove. Take that for fresh fruit and put it in your hat, farmer market. When we got back to our own little kitchen at home, exhausted, dirty, but more happy and rested than a night on the chilly New Hampshire ground should warrant, what did we eat? We ate salad. We stopped at the priciest of chain grocery stores and bought vegetables and an in-house roasted chicken, (supposedly organic and free range, and not pumped full of preservatives, but realistically, I didn’t know, and at that point I didn’t care.) Arugula, red radishes, a lemon cucumber (score!), green peppers, tiny yellow cherry tomatoes, and Vermont Creamery goat cheese found its way onto our plates. Topped with a small roasted chicken breast. Drizzled with Julia Child’s fail – safe dressing, a lemony shallot laced vinaigrette with enough Dijon mustard to really keep it together. I dumped the dressing ingredients into a Ball jar, capped and screwed on the lid and gave it a hearty shake. It made my night to eat vegetables. It also made my night to shower, sleep on clean sheets, and sip pinot noir in my living room with my feet, now sorely in need of some professional attention, up on my coffee table.

I ate that salad so fast; I don’t have a photo of it for you. The dressing is so vibrantly good that I could bathe in it, and so I will share it with you. As ridiculous as it is to share a salad dressing with you as the first recipe and a salad dressing that has been around as long as it has, at that. Put down the Good Seasonings, and pick up the mustard, because this, my friends, is worth the little time and trouble it may cost you.

Julia Child’s Classic Vinaigrette

 1 tablespoon shallot or scallion, finely minced (we had a bit of shallot, but most often I use scallions)

 1 tablespoon of Dijon mustard (I used store brand, shocker.)

 1/ 2 tablespoon of kosher salt (I thought this was too much, so I salted to taste)

The juice of 1 enormous lemon, or 2 ‘normal’ lemons

2 tablespoon red wine vinegar

Freshly ground pepper (to taste)

Dump all of the ingredients in a jar, cap securely, and shake until the mustard has emulsified the oil and vinegar. The dressing will look ‘cloudy’. Dress greens, potatoes, the protein of your choice, or your pasta salad

So much for a healthy and unprocessed life. More whole foods to come this week. I promise. More...