Vegetarian Crockpot Chili

It's been a busy week so there has been a lot of crockpot action going on in my kitchen.  Yesterday the fella threw this chili together for about the millionth time and I couldn't believe I hadn't written about it yet.  It's tasty and a great low fat/high protein meal. 

Aside from the basic seasoning and the inclusion of beans you could add whatever you have in the kitchen to this recipe to create whatever chili you're in the mood for that particular day.  It's a very forgiving recipe and beans hold up great in the crockpot so you really can't go wrong.  If you don't like spice you could skip the chipotles or go for a milder jalapeno.  Feel free to use whatever combination of beans you have around.  We used kidney and cannellini beans since we had a bunch left over from the pottage earlier in the week (I'm terrible at estimating how many dry beans to cook in order to get the amount of beans I need for a recipe.)   But we're also fond of a combination of black beans and chickpeas.

I like to top this with a little sour cream or yogurt and cilantro to add a little something extra to it while still sticking to the vaguely southwestern theme.  But if you wanted to be naughty some melted cheddar cheese on top would be amazing.  So go crazy and treat yourself to a meal  that cooks while you're at work.

Vegetarian Crockpot Chili

2 tablespoons oil

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 onion, chopped

1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

1 teaspoon cumin 

2 tablespoon chili powder 

2 teaspoons oregano

2 tablespoons soy sauce 

1 28-ounce can tomatoes (or about 1 pound fresh tomatoes chopped) 

2 cups vegetable broth

1 6-ounce can tomato paste 

2 chipotles with some of their sauce, chopped

2 14-ounce cans black beans, drained

2 14-ounce cans red kidney beans, drained

salt and  pepper, to taste 

sour cream or yogurt, as topping

cilantro, as topping

Sautee the onion, garlic and red pepper flakes until the onion is soft, about 3 to 5 minutes. Add the chili powder and cumin and cook for two more minutes. 

Place the onions along with all the remaining ingredients, except sour cream and cilantro in the crock pot, stirring to combine.  Cover and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours.

Top with sour cream and cilantro just before serving.

Recipe made much more interesting from boring original over at  About.com

Jordanian Beef Stew

This recipe defies all laws of the cooking universe as I knew them before making this meal.  It's practically magic.  There are only two spices and a handful of ingredients.  The meat cooks for an hour in plain old bland water.  There is no effort involved.  And yet this is the most delicious thing I've eaten all year.  I don't know quite why or how it's possible but I'm not complaining instead I plan in making this again and again and again.

Basically this is Beef Burgundy without all the esoteric cooking instructions or all the extra fat.  Except this beef stew is from a Jordanian recipe and is twice as delicious.  I didn't even bother serving it over rice or with yogurt like the original recipe called for because that would have just distracted from the flavors of the beef which didn't need anything added to it to make it tasty. 

Don't let the long cooking time deter you from wanting to make this.  Once you chop everything the food needs no attention so you won't notice how long the beef has been cooking.  Start it in the morning some day you have off and poke at it periodically, when its done let it cool and you'll have something great to eat that night or later in the week.  Personally I love food that cooks itself while I'm off watching a movie or playing with the dog.  This is the best kind of recipe if you ask me.

Jordanian Beef Stew
1 pound beef, cut into bite sized pieces
1 pound green beans, cut into 2 inch pieces
1 pound tomatoes, coarsely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 teaspoons coriander
2 teaspoons cumin

Sprinkle the beef with salt and pepper, place in a large skillet, and pour water over the beef until just cover. Place lid on skillet and simmer over a medium low heat for about 30 minutes or until meat is brown.

Remove 1 cup of the broth from the beef and reserve it in the bowl of your food processor.

Put the cut up green beans in with the beef and cook until tender.

Add tomatoes and garlic to the food processor and pulse until smooth. 

Once beans are done pour off a bit of water from the simmering beef so that there is enough to mostly cover the beef but there is enough room in skillet to add the tomato mixture. 

Add pureed tomato mixture, coriander and cumin to skillet.  Salt and pepper generously.  Allow to simmer uncovered for another hour or until beef is fork tender.  Will taste even better a couple days after cooking when its had time to marinate in the refrigerator.

Original recipe from Food52 Blog.

Sun Dried Tomato and Lentil Soup

After cooking this three times, I finally stopped myself from devouring it and took a picture.  Isn't it beautiful?

 

This soup was so good it never crossed my mind to take a picture of it.  I was way too busy eating it.  It's that freaking good.  And I thought it up all by myself.

See in my odd little world Monday is my day off to have the house to myself and do whatever I please unmolested.  This usually involves laying in bed until 10 or 11.  Reading in bed with the dog.  Having breakfast while watching an episode of some mindless TV show online.  Then I spend the rest of the day grocery shopping and cooking.  Usually while singing along to Goldfrappe/Lily Allen radio on Pandora.  There are are also periodic bouts of dog love throughout the day. 

And that for me is the perfect day off.  That's partly because I'm a huge food nerd who loves to cook and also because if I don't cook on Monday I won't get a chance to the next two days while working double jobs.  I learned early on that I can put up with most anything at work as long as I know I have something good to eat on my break, it keeps me from ripping out my hair and wanting to strangle co-workers.  So on Monday I make something delicious that will re-heat well to keep me sane at work the two following days. 

The fella also benefits from this situation as he doesn't have to spend his evenings alone trying to decifer whatever gibberish I've written on the weekly menu that he should be cooking that night, that almost never ended well.  I love him like crazy but one of his talents is not reading Emily-ese.    And yeah that's right I plan a menu every week so that everything that gets bought gets cooked.  I hear about people who go to the store throw things in the cart and hope for the best when they get home, I can't imagine it.  It's insanity.

So being the super planny sort it probably won't surprise you that my next weird admission is that I'm a terminal follower of recipes. I'm lost without them.  Or was until recently.  Something clicked in my brain this week and I noticed I don't need recipes much anymore, they're more of a way to come up with a concept and then I cook it the way I would like it better.  It's worked out so far. 

Then magically on Monday I closed my eyes thought “lentil sundried tomato soup” and made it happen with no recipe guidance whatsoever.  It was a big moment for me and I was rewarded with literally the best soup I've ever made.  It's big and thick and tasty.  Exactly what I want to eat when it's cold and the lack of sun is making me a bit punchy.

Something tells me this newly concocted recipe will be in heavy rotation on the menu for the rest of the winter.  And it should be on your's too because it couldn't be easier.

 

Sun Dried Tomato and Lentil Soup

2 tablespoons oil from jar of sundried tomatoes
2 small onions, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 large stalks celery, chopped

1 bay leaf
2 sprigs fresh thyme
1 cup lentils
5 cups vegetable stock

8 sundried tomatoes packed in oil, rinsed and chopped
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
salt and pepper to taste

In a soup pot over medium high heat warm the sun dried tomato oil, when oil is warm add onions, garlic and celery.  Saute the vegetables until soft but not browned, agitating them often while cooking.

Add the bay leaf, thyme, lentils and vegetable stock.  Allow to come to a boil then reduce heat to a simmer.  Let cook about 15 or 20 minutes, or until lentils are tender.  Depending on how thick you like your soups you may need to add more vegetable broth at this point.

Add the rinsed sundried tomatoes and red pepper flakes to the soup.  Stir well and cook soup just until tomatoes are heated through.  Add salt and pepper to taste if necessary.  Remove thyme sprigs and bay leaf and enjoy.

Oxtail Rioja

The original goal in this diet was to cook French all the time, really dive in and learn French cooking while losing weight. It took about a week before we started missing variety, spices and Indian food so we had to edit our weekly menus to include more things we already love. This has made us both much happier, after all it was our love of very very spicy food that was one the the things that brought the fella and I together in the first place. On our first date he made a chickpea vindaloo and on our second I made a Thai coconut shrimp dish that was so spicy we were crying but refused to stop eating it.

His passion for food (and life in general) made me fall in love with him so I wasn't about to ruin that by tossing our culinary love affair into disarray on a regimen of food seasoned only in heavy cream and garlic. We settled on a nice middle ground of doing serious French cooking just 2 or 3 times a week and for special occasions so we don't burn out or die from lack of curry.

Last night was a French cooking evening and though we're almost a month in to this project it's the first time I actually felt like we had an authentic French experience. We made Oxtail Rioja which had all the important aspects of French cooking; extremely long cooking time, lots of wine, and odd cuts of meat. Aside from a couple organ meats I might try with a great recipe and lots of people to help me eat it, oxtails are about as weird as my meat eating habits extend. Sweetbreads will not make an appearance in my cooking.

This all starts at 5PM when went shopping for wine. I've tried all the affordable riojas at the store I work in so we were at the local warehouse grocery store and their equally large liquor department. There were too many choices so I pointed at four $11 to $15 bottles I've never had before and told the fella to choose. I'm proud of his rapidly developing love of wine so I trust him to chose a good one. He picked the Marqueas de Caceres 2005 Crianza Rioja which is a blend of Tempranillo, Garnacha, and Graciano grapes. And I grabbed a bottle of El Coto Rioja (which we love and call the reindeer wine) because it was cheap and I knew it was good. We ended up needing both bottles so I was glad we had the forethought to get both.



5:30 I start following Boulod's intensive instructions for chopping all the vegetables and begin looking side long at the very ugly oxtails, wondering if this was my best idea. Then I start pan frying the meat, the smell is heavenly, I regain my confidence. However it is now 6:30 and we're still cooking veggies and just barely getting the wine reduced. Eating at 8 is now looking like 9:30 given the 3 hours cooking time.

We eat a spinach salad while surrounded by the amazing smell of oxtails soaked in red wine and homemade chicken broth. Then we eat some cheese and turkey while starting in on the wine, we're starving. The El Coto went into the broth as it turned out to be the lighter bodied less sweet wine we bought. I would most simply describe it as a spicy Pinot Noir. It's one of my favorite wines I keep going back to time and again, the gloriously ridiculous deer on the bottle doesn't hurt either. We decanted the Marqueas de Caceres as it was a super tight kick in the back of the throat right out of the bottle. With some rest it was a powerhouse of fruit, with the perfect mix of spice and tannins. In the midst of a great hunger and wine induced fugue state it began to taste exactly like a ripe plum rolled in cloves. In a word...yummy.



During the 3 hours of cooking I spent my time writing and sitting near the stew, periodically skimming the increasingly disgusting layer of grease that was forming at the top of the pot. By the end I had to dump the bowl of yuck three times and the stew was still very greasy. This was not my favorite thing I've ever done.



At 10 the fella and I swooped into the kitchen and looked at the ugly pot of meat and wine we had been anxiously sipping wine and waiting for seemingly forever. It was an experience. It is not something you want to eat in front of someone unless you've been living together for two years as it is a massive cartilage nibbling mess. It was very French.



The meat itself was very good and extremely tender but I wish I would have trimmed the fat and gristle off before cooking because this really was very greasy stew. However the vegetables were odd and overly soft. I think using cubanelle peppers was a mistake, the flavor wasn't right and they never quite agree with my stomach, however I had no idea how else to translate “green frying peppers” from the maddening recipe into reality. The fella really loved this recipe regardless of how late we ate, then again he is a much bigger red meat fan than I am. It just means more left overs for him.

We have plans to try to make a crock pot version of this, learning from our mistakes and refusing to spend that much time cooking stew again. That is after a good amount of time has gone by because at the moment I've had it with the word oxtail and still recovering from an entire evening devoted to cooking.

I'm having a chicken breast and an orange for lunch.

Oxtail Rioja


4 pounds oxtails, cut into 2 inch-thick pieces (I used 2 pounds and felt it was too much meat)
1 tablespoon paprika
salt, pepper and flour for dredging (I cut out flour)
1/4 cup oil


¼ pound Serrano ham, cut into 1/2 inch dice
1 head garlic, cut crosswise in half
1 large onion, cut into 1/2 inch dice
1 large carrot, cut into 1/2 inch dice (I used 2 stalks of celery)
1 pound green frying peppers, cored, deveined and diced (I used cubanelles)


1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 pound tomatoes, cored and each cut into 8 pieces


1 bay leaf
2 sprigs Italian parsley (I just used some dried parsley)
1 sprig thyme
cheese cloth or paper tea bag for loose leaf tea


4 cups rioja/tempranillo wine (a full bottle and 1 cup of a second bottle)
4 cups chicken stock


1/ 2 cup sliced blanched almonds, toasted (I was so hungry I forgot this part)


Season the oxtails on all sides with paprika, salt and pepper then dredge in flour (I didn't use flour and they turned out just fine.) Pour oil into large saute pan over medium high heat. When oil is hot, add the oxtails (you might have to do them in batches) and cook, turning to brown all sides, about 10 minutes. Transfer the oxtails to a plate and pour off all but 2 tablespoons of the fat from pan.


Switch to a large flat bottomed soup pot still over medium high heat and warm the reserved 2 tablespoons of oxtail fat. Add ham, garlic, onion, carrot (or celery), and green peppers to the pan and cook, stirring frequently until vegetables are soft but not colored, about 15 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste and tomatoes. Create the herb sachet by placing the bay leaf, parsley and thyme in cheese cloth or a tea bag, then toss in the pot.


Return oxtails to the pot along with the wine. Bring wine to a boil, skimming the foam off that rises to the surface and cook until the wine is reduced by half. Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil once again, then adjust heat so that the liquid is barely simmering. Cover the pan and cook at a simmer for 2 ½ hours. During thus time you must periodically skim off the foam and grease solids that bubble to the top of the broth.


Remove the cover and simmer for another 30 minutes or until the sauce is reduced and slightly thickened. This is also your last chance to remove the remaining grease before serving. The sauce won't be very thick but it should coat the oxtails.


Discard the garlic and herb sachet. Serve oxtails in bowls with generous serving of the vegetables ans sauce to cover them. Sprinkle with almonds just before eating.


Original recipe from Cafe Boulud Cookbook.

The Fella's Vegetable Stock

In honor of the fella who I am missing at the moment as he has been kidnapped for the evening into a sleep study, I'm going to share the one thing I will never attempt, it's totally his thing. He has the patience and the practice to make it come out yummy everytime.

I'm talking about stock; chicken, or veggie it doesn't matter, he is the master of making broth. We share cooking duties and neither of us are slouches in the meal department but I'm leaving this and bacon exclusively in his very capable hands. I'm happy with obsessive chopping and measuring being my forte.

He's going to be making a lot of stock during this diet seeing as Madison has not one sugarless broth to be had in any of the various grocery stores. That's okay, his broth tastes better and it means once a week I come home to a roasted chicken. Then later in the week I come home to delicious smelling broth and the dog laying in the kitchen with puddles of drool under her.

Here she is dreaming of a world where tennis balls are chicken stock flavored.

The Fella's Vegetable Stock


Save the stems and inedible bits of all the vegetables you cook with that week and put them on a big bag in the freezer. The green bits of leeks and scallions, wilting spinach and celery, the stems of broccoli and mushrooms, that half an onion that's sitting in the fridge. Chop the vegetable bits to they will fit in the biggest pot you have and toss it all in.


Then find any fresh herbs you have lying around and toss some of those in. If you don't have any fresh use dried rosemary, thyme, and parsley to add some flavor. The only flavors that seem to be musts for a successful broth are onion, garlic, salt and pepper. Everything else is left up to what you like and have around.


Now pour enough water to cover all the vegetables and herbs. This will probably be about a gallon of liquid to start with and as it evaporates and boils off you will have to keep adding more to keep the vegetables moist.


Bring the stock to a boil and then lower the heat to a simmer. You want to keep heating things through and leaching the flavors out of the vegetables but you don't want to burn or scorch things so keep an eye on it. Now let it simmer for about 6 hours, adding water when needed. It doesn't need close baby sitting as long as you poke at it every so often.


When the broth has a nice brown hue and the vegetables are all limp it's time to start cooling it off. Taste the stock to see if it needs more salt or pepper and add it until you're happy with the flavor. When it is about room temperature you may want to send it through a couple layers of cheese cloth to remove the herbs and such that gather at the bottom of homemade broth. Next portion it out in containers the size you will need for cooking, we do 1 and 2 cup containers so we can thaw small bits as we need them.


To make chicken stock just add a chicken carcass at the beginning and spend a lot of time skimming fat off the top of the cooling broth, that's the only difference. The fella doesn't get all scientific about things, he just does what he knows we'll like but if you want more technical directions check out Alton Brown's episode of Good Eats on the subject and be very very amused. Or use that crock pot you have sitting around to make an even lower maintenance stock.

Minestrone Alla Tuscana

It's not very photogenic but I promise you it's delicious and filling. Just the sort of thing to come home to after working two jobs and getting a ticket for failure to remove 8 inches of ice from a side walk no one ever uses. If someone at the Madison streets department would like to come over and tell us how to do such a thing with out super powers I would be curious to know. I figure it should be included in the $182 dollar ticket. As it was the fella and our duplex neighbor were outside with ice picks and 75 pounds of salt and sand until 1AM so as not to get a repeat offender violation. Oh the bureaucracy.

Days like these I really thank the heavens for comfort food and a fella that cooks for me on my long days. This soup was definitely the high point of the day. The half hour of no work and no winter weather drama during which I filled my weary belly with this warm meal was the only pleasant bit.

It's from the Silver Spoon Cookbook which is swiftly becoming my favorite for recipes these days. Besides chopping and boiling it really takes no effort. It took so little effort and was so ugly and beige he figured it was going to be inedible mush and was a little sad about spending time on it. He changed his tune after the first bite. It really does need a make over but aside from that it's perfect, lots of veggies and for having so little in it the soup manages to have a nice zing to it. Must be the rosemary and pepper.

We'll be making this again soon. Next time I'll probably forgo taking pictures of it at work though. People at the office job already think I'm crazy without the photo shoots with my food. It's not that they're wrong I just don't want to get them any more evidence to work with.

Minestrone Alla Toscana

½ cup cannellini beans, soaked over night and drained(or one can, retain liquid for cooking)
1 sprig fresh rosemary
1 bay leaf
4 tablespoons oil
1 onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 tablespoon parsley
1 head escarole (or any bitter green, he used a couple handfuls of spinach)
1 tomato, chopped
1 zucchini, chopped
1 leek, white part only, chopped
½ cup brown rice

Put beans, rosemary and bay leaf in sauce pot, add enough cold water to cover. Bring to a boil and simmer about 2 hours, then discard herbs. (If you're using canned beans, you can obviously skip this step and just add the herbs to the soup and discard them in the end.) Place about half of them and the starchy water in food processor to puree.

In soup pot heat oil over low heat. Add onion, celery, and parsley, cook stirring occasionally for about 5 minutes. Add escarole, tomato, zucchini, and leek, cook for another 10 minutes. Stir the bean puree and remaining beans into soup pot, season with salt and pepper. Add enough water to cover the vegetables or to make your preferred soup consistency.  Bring to a boil, add rice and cook for about 20 minutes or until rice is al dente.

Vichyssoise sans Pomme de Terre

That's about the extent of my French language skills and that's with help from the dreaded babelfish. My passion for French cooking however seems to be growing.

While making something from The Silver Spoon Cookbook which has recipes that are much less complex and picky than what I started out with I was actually disappointed at the lack of specific instructions. All I had to work with was statements like “put the celery, leeks and potatoes in a pan.” But what size should the leek pieces be, should I cut them on the bias, what size pan, should the measuring cup I use for the cream be metal or glass? They weren't giving me much to work with. I had actually gotten used to finicky Boulud instructions. I was having fussy French cooking withdrawal!

Worse when I went to make a salad to go with the meal I instinctively grabbed a carrot to add to the spinach. Instead of chopping it or grating it which a week ago would have been my first thought I was using the peeler to make ribbons in the salad without even thinking about it. The only thing that gave away my usual behavior was the fella's face.

“What are you doing?” I looked around to see if I had started something on the stove on fire until I looked down and saw the carrot ribbons. Gasping slightly I gazed upon the beautiful carrots on top of the salad and had to laugh at myself. It's only been a week and I'm a slave to French techniques.

“I didn't mean to.” This I said as if I had run over someone's cat. I really couldn't believe without any conscious effort on my part I was doing something the more difficult and presentation minded way.

“Oh my god you miss Boulud don't you?” There was no hiding it I had to shake my head sheepishly and fess up. “That's so hot you cooking nerd.”

I hope he still thinks so a couple months from now after the millionth load of butter caked dishes. It's been an adjustment for us with him washing every night and me cooking where as for the last two years we've switched back and forth every other night. Look at him scrubbing away and silently cursing me.



Lucky for him the Vichyssoise was pretty light on the dishes. And almost embarrassingly easy to make for tasting so good. The only change I had to make was switching sweet potatoes in for the carb heavy absolutely forbidden potatoes. Yams have a GI of 60 which isn't great but is way better than the 95 of a cooked spud. They also gave the soup a sinful added sweetness. Heathens that we are we even ate it warm so I'm not a total convert to Frenchness.

The soup was about as photogenic as turnip baby food so I'm going to spare the world that. However look at the delicious Vouvray the fella picked up at Whole Foods entirely on his own without any prompting. He's pretty amazing. Look at him quickly becoming a wine expert.



It went perfectly with the big creamy tongue-coating soup. The body was super light with bright subtle fruit that worked as a wonderful palate cleanser, making every spoonful of Vichyssoise more and more delightful. Alone I think this particular Vouvray would have been too light to make an impression, but with dinner it was pleasant.

Vichyssoise


2 large stalks celery, chopped coarsely
2 leeks, white part only, chopped coarsely
2 sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
4 cups chicken stock
1 scant cup heavy cream


Put celery, leeks and sweet potatoes into soup pot. Pour in stock and season with salt and pepper to taste. Bring the broth to a boil, reduce heat to a simmer and cook for about 45 or when all vegetables are soft.


Ladle broth and vegetables into food processor and puree until smooth. If you can't fit it all into food processor at once do it bit by bit, transferring puree to a large bowl until you've worked through all the broth.


Put puree back in pot on stove over medium heat. Add cream and heat through.


(Original recipe calls for cooling soup in the fridge before eating but I liked it better hot.)

Angel Hair Pasta and Vegetable Ribbons

If there is one thing I've learned in cooking very esoteric French recipes the last two days is that the French have a weird thing about celery.

Last night I made a delicious vegetable and pasta dish from Daniel Boulud and Dorie Greenspan's Cafe Boulud Cookbook that had some of the most random mind boggling preparation instructions I have ever seen. The first of which instructed me to peel four stalks of celery. Celery needs peeling? How does one even go about doing that? I refuse to believe that I'm the only person who has never heard of such a thing. Figuring the French must have very different celery and not seeing a celery peel in sight I moved on to the next step.

“Using a vegetable peeler, cut long ribbons from the celery by running peeler down the length of the vegetables. Don't worry if they're not all the same size—just try to keep the ribbons long and thin.” The thing that worried me was that when I held the celery over the bowl of water it was supposed to be shredding into the celery stalks kept breaking. All I was ribboning was my fingers. I made it through three of the stalks making very sad uneven stalks when the fella came home.

“Don't look I'm doing something very embarrassing,” I yelled running to the door with a vegetable peeler and slightly bruised fingers. One of the many reasons I keep him around is that he barely flinches at these almost daily declarations of near insanity that meet him at the door. He just gave me a kiss and probably let his imagine wander through the possibilities before he wandered into the kitchen a few minutes later.

He stopped in the doorway and raised and eye brow. I could tell he was trying to convince himself to just do dishes and not get pulled into my craziness. “Okay I gotta ask. What are you doing?”

“Making ribbons. I dunno it's French. This recipe is overwhelming me already. I don't know if I can do this.” I threw the remaining celery stalk on the cutting board and tried to avoid a mini cooking tantrum of frustration, the kind that tends to pepper my meal preparation when I'm making something new. This ribbon making thing seemed really unnecessary and was starting to get to me. I decided to take it out on the celery, I pinned it down to the cutting board and frantically took the peeler to it. To my great surprise beautiful even ribbons of celery started piling up. I guess amongst all the other steps Boulud didn't have time to add this helpful bit of ribbon making instructions.

Next I was to bruise lemongrass and bind it to cilantro. This was starting to get a tad kinky for pasta preparation but I followed all the seemingly random instructions none the less. I still don't know why the scallions needed to be cut on the bias or the shallots patted dry several times but I'm not a famous French chef so just barely kept myself from ripping out my hair as I did every little picky thing he asked. There was a fair amount of huffing and puffing and sighing during the ritual however.

The recipe instructions are semi out of order for a kitchen without a sous chef and for all the importance he places on exactly how to chop vegetables, once the food is in the pot he doesn't have a lot of advice about what is going on. Somehow I got the broth made, the pasta boiled, sesame seeds toasted, and shallots fried while everything was still hot even though Boulud's instructions were backwards as all hell. For example he didn't mentioned the sesame seeds needed to be toasted until the end of the recipe when I was supposed to be garnishing and all the dishes were already dirty.

Lucky for you I translated the recipe into something that makes a little more sense. There are a lot of ingredients that need a fair bit of attention and a lot of steps to get right or you end up with cold broth and pasta stuck together waiting for the shallots to finish browning. The important part is getting all the vegetables taken care of before beginning to cook anything, that takes away a lot of the frustration. And I hope I separated the steps out so that it makes easier to understand what needs to happen when. It seems a bit much but Boulud must have a reason for all of it because this is one of the best things I've taken the time to cook. It was filling, had complex textures, and was really flavorful.

This time I even think I got the wine right. Seven Daughters is a blend of seven white varietals from California. For a kitschy wine that's marketed towards being “the perfect girl's night out wine” according to their overly flashy wine site it had a rather intricate flavor.

It started out with a buttery chardonnay flavor with hints of honey and Riesling on the front of the tongue. Towards the back of the mouth the Sauvignon Blanc became out more and there was a bit of a pleasant green summer vegetable flavor that really brought out the leek in the pasta. All in all a decent white blend in the $10 to $15 price range though it wasn't my favorite, after one glass it all the competing varietals became cloyingly sweet. After all that aggravating recipe translation you better bet I earned that second glass and a goofy movie curled up with my fella and our pup.

Angel Hair Pasta and Vegetable Ribbons

4 stalks celery, trimmed
1 medium leek, white part only, quartered lengthwise and washed

1 one inch length of lemongrass, bruised
3 sprigs cilantro
small length of cooking twine

4 cups water
2 tablespoons soy sauce
7 ounces of mushrooms, trimmed and quartered (original recipe calls for enoki, I used white button mushrooms)
(original recipe also called for 16 shiitake mushrooms which I could not find in time to cook this meal)
1 bunch scallions, trimmed and cut on the bias in 1 inch lengths
1 tablespoon finely slivered ginger

1 teaspoon sesame oil
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes

½ pound angel hair pasta
2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds

2 medium shallots sliced very thinly with mandolin or sharp knife
2 tablespoons flavorless oil

1 lime
3 tablespoons cilantro leaves for garnish

Find a skillet, pot to boil pasta in, a small bowl, a large mixing bowl, and a soup pot. (The timing of the recipe gets thrown if you don't have everything out and ready to use as you need it.)

Using a vegetable peeler, cut long ribbons from the celery. (I found this was easiest by putting celery round side down on cutting board and peeling ribbons from the top edge. When I held the celery I ended up mostly peeling myself.) Put the celery ribbons and quartered leek pieces in large bowl and pour enough water in to just cover vegetables. Set aside for now as you cut up the rest of the vegetables.

Tie lemongrass and cilantro together using kitchen twine. Place in soup pot and pour in the 4 cups of water, soy sauce, mushrooms, scallions, and ginger. Bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer for about 15 minutes.

Drain water from celery and leeks and place it in the pot you are going to boil pasta in. Add celery and leeks to broth along with sesame oil and red pepper flakes then simmer another 5 minutes. Start water boiling for pasta.

In skillet, put sesame seeds on medium heat to toast them. Agitate them regularly so that they don't burn. When toasted set aside.

While waiting for sesame seeds to toast and pasta water to boil, slice the shallot and place pieces in small bowl of cold water. When sesame seeds are finished wipe out the skillet. Put oil in skillet to heat up in order to cook shallots. About this time the pasta water should be ready so put pasta in to cook until just al dente. When oil is hot remove shallots from water and pat off with paper towels. Carefully toast shallots in oil until brown and caramelized. Remove from oil, pat off and set aside.

When pasta is al dente, drain it and divide it into 4 shallow bowls (or 2 bowls and save the other 2 portions for next day's lunch.) Squeeze lime into broth and stir briefly before ladling broth and vegetables over over the pasta. Top with fried shallots, cilantro and toasted sesame seeds.

Original recipe by Daniel Boulud