Fun times with Lloyd

Last week I had a visit from a dear friend, Lloyd, who I have known since the 4th grade. She and I have, as you might expect, many common interests. But it is our tradition to use our time together in order to create a delicious meal. This also, of course, gives us plenty of time to talk and catch up, since we don't see each other nearly enough. So this time, we made a three course meal: a soup, a salad, and main course-ish second soup related item. Nothing wrong with that!

We started with a nice corn and potato chowder,  getting a recipe from Food Network, which we somewhat modified.

Corn and Potato Chowder
1/2 pack of bacon (we used black pepper crusted bacon, which added a nice spicy taste!)
1 cup chopped onion
1 tbs minced garlic
2 cups frozen corn
butter
2 tbs flour

4 cups chopped potato (peeled first!)

4 cups chicken broth

1 cup half and half

thyme, salt, pepper to taste

Chop up and fry the bacon, then set aside on a paper towel to drain - leave a little bacon fat in the pan, but not all of it. Toss the onions into the fat, cook those up nice and soft, then put in the garlic as well.  Sprinkle the flour over it all so it blends in, adding some butter if necessary to make a roux, then add the potatoes and broth. Simmer 10-15 minutes until the potatoes are soft, stirring occasionally. Next, add corn and let simmer another 5 minutes. Finally, stir in the half and half and add seasonings.

This is the point where you taste to make sure everything is just right - we found that the soup was not thick enough here, and added some extra potatoes. Another option we considered (but rejected due to not wanting to wash more dishes) was be to blend some of the potatoes we'd cooked in a blender with some of the soup, so we could have  nice, thicker broth. Even adding the potatoes, we needed this to cook down a bit more than the original recipe suggested. It turned out quite tasty, and extra peppery due to our choice in bacon! (Bacon is a running theme in Lloyd and my cooking attempts, I shall have to describe some past efforts at a later date.)

Second, we had a lovely salad: Pear, Romaine lettuce, crumbled gorgonzola, and homemade roasted candied walnuts! The first 3 ingredients of this salad are pretty self explanatory (make sure items are in suitable sized chunks, or in the case of the pears, slices). The candied walnuts were a treat, though, and a lot easier then they sound!

Candied Walnuts (paired with a pear/romaine/gorgonzola salad)
1 cup chopped walnuts (or whole, either works!)
1.5 tbs butter
1.5 tbs maple syrup
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar

A note here: I am a purist when it comes to maple syrup. I DON'T eat maple flavored or maple inspired syrups. At all. No Aunt Jemima's for me. I just can't stand the taste - I was raised going to New Hampshire every other summer for family reunions and picking up delicious, grade A pure maple syrup in large gallon jugs, which was then used over the course of the next year or two until we returned. Dad would, occasionally, buy local maple syrup as well, which was also fine - honestly, I couldn't tell the difference between New Hampshire and Maryland syrup. But the point is: REAL SYRUP. /end{rant}

This recipe is super easy: Preheat oven to 400F. Put the butter and syrup in a bowl, heat it up so they are nice and warm and melty together - in the microwave works just fine. Take your walnuts, then put them in the bowl with the syrup mixture - stir thoroughly until everything is well coated. Mix salt and sugar in another bowl, then sprinkle some of this over the walnuts, mixing again. Lay out all the walnuts in a single layer on a piece of aluminum foil on a tray, and sprinkle the last of the salt/sugar mix over that. Bake for 7 minutes. Remove from oven, let sit and cool, then poof! Delicious walnuts, the better to be sprinkled over your salad with, my dear! So that was the salad - nice, tasty, easy. Pears, gorgonzola and walnuts of course go terrific together, with a bit of lettuce to fill things out!

But the dish that's was the most fun for me was a dish I'd made before, gotten from Benson: delicious homemade Wonton!

Wonton

Around 2 lbs ground meat (Pork works best, but chicken works fine, too)

Around 1 lb peeled, de-veined, raw shrimp –   chopped into chunks (optional)

Wonton wrappers

Baby Bok Choy – chopped finely, maybe a cup and a half, maybe a little more. 

Light Soy Sauce

Sesame oil

1 tbs Cornstarch

1/2 tsp Sugar

Salt

Scallions (optional)

MSG (optional)

Mix the ground meat, salt, soy sauce, MSG, cornstarch, salt, sugar thoroughly, and set aside. Wash and chop bok choy finely, mix into ground meat, add even more soy sauce and a bit of seseme oil. Its a good idea to cook up a little of your meat mix in a frying pan to make sure that the soy sauce/oil/salt levels are good. (Plus, if you have extra, you can fry up the remaining meat as a tasty snack!) Mix chopped up shrimp into mixture, adding more soy sauce and whatnot if you think it needs it. You don't actually need to add shrimp - for this batch we didn't - since it tastes just fine without. But shrimp does add some extra flavor and a bit more interesting variation!

Now the fun part: wrapping the wontons.Take a wrapper with the more floured sized face down, put a bit of meat mix into the center of the wrapper. Dampen the edges of the wrapper, fold over into a triangle (or rectangle if you don't want to be traditional). Seal the edges carefully - you should have a small bowl of water that you can dip your fingers into so you can wet the edges well. Take the far corners of the wonton (the ones where the meat is in a lump between them), dampen more, and fold them to meet each other, seal. As you do this, you can kind of fold the wonton slightly as well, so it's more rounded and less flat. The traditional wonton is apparently supposed to look like an ingot of gold, to bring luck! Boil beef or chicken broth, add some scallions and sesame seed oil, cook wontons in broth until they float, plus a little more time (like an extra couple minutes), until meat and shrimp have cooked. You'll want to cut one in half to make sure it's done! Then serve with the broth, and enjoy!

The whole meal turned out really well - we ended up with three bowls of food and no plates, mind, but that's not really a problem.

Pork Wellington

I'm currently visiting my parents (as is my uncle) just in time for the hurricane. And what is the best thing to do on a day when you don't feel like going out? Cook a delicious meal, of course! And best of all, since I'm making food for four, that means I can go all out and make something LARGE.

One of the things I dislike about living by yourself (or with a roommate who doesn't eat with you much), is that when I cook I have to eat everything myself - which means I get all the leftovers. So my options are 1) cooking things that freeze well; 2) cooking only very small batches of things; or 3) get ready to eat that curry all week long. But when I'm at home, I can do things like roast entire chickens or ducks and other large-scale projects, and then I get to cook again the next day, if so I chose, and make something entirely different. So by request of my mother, I repeated a dish today that I last made for my family with the aid of my boyfriend, Benson, that I haven't made since last spring.

Now, in general, I'm not a huge fan of pork as a meal. Bacon, yes. Ribs, delicious. Sausage, the BEST pizza topping. But a pork chop, or roast ham.... meh. However, when we were looking for a fun recipe last spring, Benson thought this recipe looked like it would be awesome. I was not, at first, that enthused by the idea of a pork dish, but I was willing to give it a go. And boy am I glad I did: this dish is fun and straightforward to make, looks beautiful, and tastes absolutely scrumptious.

So I was happy to try making it again: from Alton Brown's Good Eats, a delicious Pork Wellington. That link has a handy video of Alton Brown making and explaining the dish, which is probably a far better explanation than what follows.

1 egg, whisked with about a tbs of water.
a few oz of chopped dried or fresh apple (1 small apple's worth)
1 whole pork tenderloin, ~1lb, but larger is fine as long as you can stretch pastry!
4.5 oz proscuitto
salt, pepper, thyme (preferably freshly chopped)
flour
1 sheet thawed puff pastry
1 tbs mustard
Optional but tasty: sliced mushrooms!

Preheat your oven to 400F. You want the tenderloin in 2 long pieces, and you want to remove the fat, silver skin, and gristly parts before proceeding.

First, roll out your puff pastry to be the length of the tenderloin, and wide enough to wrap around it - about 12x14 inches should be fine. You want this well floured so it doesn't stick to the tin or anything, and if you have parchment paper, you're going to end up baking everything on that in the end, so you can put the pastry on that. You'll want to spread a bit of mustard on a strip down the length of the pastry, so that you will have a nice, but not overwhelming, tangy tast. I used dijon mustard, that worked fine.

Next, in a separate space, layer your proscuitto on some parchment paper (I used wax paper, since we didn't have any parchment - that works fine for this part, too) out to the length of your tenderloin and press down, so it sticks to itself well, then sprinkle that with salt, pepper, and thyme. Place the tenderloins down on this, one on top of the other, with the apples in between. This is also where you want to put any delicious mushrooms you want to add: I used mushrooms the first time, but this time we didn't have any around. Adding them just adds another layer of tastiness to your resulting meal, but they aren't required.

Now, this is the tricky part: ROLL. You'll kind of roll it  up WITH the parchment paper, but you don't want the paper to get caught up in the tenderloin - you just want the proscuitto in a nice tight bundle around the pork. So if you've ever rolled something on a sushi mat, it's kind of like that - roll a bit, shift the paper, roll a bit more, shift the paper a bit more out of the way. Then transfer the whole thing onto the puff pastry, still holding it in the parchment paper to make sure it stays together during the transfer, then removing the paper once it's on the pastry. Now the wrapping is a bit more straightforward - you can just lift up the pastry over the tenderloin, and tuck in the edges. You should use some of the egg mixture to moisten the edges so that the pastry sticks to itself. You want to tuck in the ends, as well, so it's in once nice secure bundle.

Brush the whole thing well with the egg mix, so you get a nice toasty colour at the end and the pastry remains moist, and bake it! For a pound, this will be 30 minutes or so. Mine was actually 2 pounds, but I managed to stretch everything around it just fine, so I didn't really need to double anything, I just added extra apples, and maybe a bit extra proscuitto. You'll want to use a meat thermometer to make sure it's done, however, at least 140F inside temperature. When it's done, rest 10 minutes so the juices don't run. We didn't actually have any parchment paper, so I just baked the thing on the pan straight. So it stuck to the pan a bit. Not a huge deal, it looked gorgeous and would have gotten a bit messed up when we cut it anyway.

Aiming for dinner at 6, I was pleased that I was going to get the food into the oven at 5:30. It was at this point - putting it in the oven - that I discovered that Hurricane Sandy had knocked out some, but not all, of the outlets in our house, including the oven. This resulted in my uncle and my father physically tilting the oven forward so I could grab the cord, and stretching said cord to another, functional outlet. This resulted in a significantly delayed dinner - made longer by the fact that I didn't actually REALIZE that my father had given me a 2 lb tenderloin, when I was looking at a recipe with a cooking time designed for one pound.


However, all's well that ends well! Here is the delicious result:

Absolutely beautiful