Dinners with Friends...outdoor edition

When Summer arrives we pretty much move outdoors. After being cooped up in the house all Winter (especially this last one) and on rainy Spring days we can't wait to spend as much time outside as possible, whether it be in the back yard

where we can run around and play

provided someone plays with us

or laying about on the porch because laziness just comes with the territory

and it fits some of us so well

So it just goes to reason that we shall eat outside as much as possible, which reminds me of Europe. Don't ask me why, maybe its all those outdoor cafes and beautiful parks and the fact that they let you drink wine in them. So where should we transport ourselves for this outdoor European dinner, well Portugal of course, and the Algarve where we dined twice outdoors in the lovely gardens of Julio's on the region's specialty: frango piri-piri. Trying to duplicate that idyllic setting is not easy considering they are on the Mediterranean coast and we're in...well, South Orange, NJ (far from the Jersey Shore thank God), so we'll just have to fake it and let our imaginations soar.

(think of sand under your feet and twinkly white lights) Invite some friends over

and serve them some food.

Ensalada de Atun y pimientos del Piquillo (OK I cheated this is Spanish)

One can of roasted piquillo peppers, drained and sliced in strips
One can of Atun (tuna) in olive oil drained
2 hard boiled eggs, chopped
Olive oil
Salt & Pepper to taste

Mix the first three ingredients carefully, season with salt & pepper, add olive oil as needed to incorporate the ingredients.
Serve as either a salad or on grilled bread

Fig and Olive Tapenade, a bastardised recipe from this one by the great David Lebovitz

(I used green figs, not dried)

Frango piri-piri

1 medium sized chicken, washed and split lengthwise at the breast bone but not in two

1 cup of piri-piri sauce

a pinch of ground piri piri chiles (can substitute Thai)

a pinch of oregano

salt

After splitting the chicken so it lies flat, flatten as much as possible with a mallet. Place the chicken in a shallow glass pan, season with salt and pour the piri-piri sauce over it. Marinate covered in the refrigerator for 3 hours. Remove the chicken and sprinkle with some ground piri-piri and oregano. Grill.

Chop the chicken in pieces and serve. Traditionally it is served over a plain salad of lettuce onions and tomatoes and french fries which I cheated and made in the oven because I didn't want to be frying away while everyone was having a good time

For dessert I wanted to serve Portugal's greatest invention, Pasteis de Nata

which I unfortunately didn't have time to either make or run out and buy at the last minute ( you shouldn't buy them days ahead, which I could have done, they dry up which is criminal) so instead we settled for grilled plums in syrup adapted from this hilarious post from Scarletta Bakes. I left out the tostadas and put a dollop of Ricotta cheese instead. They were a big hit, especially the syrup (you know who you are!)

...and Max, he got NO leftovers and behaved like a perfect little gentleman

Ahem. Hopefully memories are short.

SumsumsumsumSummertime!

So it finally arrived, by date at least and the Summer solstice and long daylight hours. Hmmm. And also by the swarms of mosquitoes which don't let us enjoy the outdoors at night as much as we'd like to. Our remedy for fighting these annoying little critters, in addition to spraying ourselves all over with foul smelling deterrent, is fire. Yes fire, candles especially scented ones seem to work pretty well, putting them lit on your head probably works best since they seem to stay away from the fire, albeit a little dangerous. Frank lit an old citronella candle whose wick was missing with newspaper and almost set then entire patio on fire. Anything to enjoy Summer though. I think Max has the right idea

Yes, lying around on the porch and being lazy, which really plays on his strengths. Meanwhile we'll watch as the tomatoes grow and ripen so we can have more of this stuff

which as far as I'm concerned pretty much defines Summer food. And we can watch these guys bloom

so we can bring them in the house

and they pretty much define Summer flowers...that is until the day lilies pop up! Can't wait..in the meantime we'll just go stare at the rain

Yay Summer!

Waiting for Summer

It's almost here! In the meantime we'll watch some flowers bloom:

Pompoms

Mock Orange

Peonies

Stella D'oros

and we'll lie on the grass in anticipation

aaahhhh, can't wait!

29...really????

No that is not my age...though I could pass, ahem. It is the amount of years Frank and I have been married which usually shocks people; not because they think we're too young (which they usually do...really!) but because it's 29 years and that's a long time. Does it feel that long, does it feel long at all? Heavens no, I don't even know how you measure that, I do know it feels like it's exactly where we should be.

So today I read on the internet where 33% of divorced women knew they were making a mistake when walking down the aisle, and they still went through with it? How desperate are some people? And clearly the guy standing there at the end of that long walk wasn't this one!

And what did we do to commemorate this momentous occasion? Well since we're a couple of old fogeys; we had a bottle of champagne (or 2) and I made my husband's favorite dinner, after all 29 years doesn't just happen overnight.

Roast rack of lamb-adapted by me

1 rack of lamb, Frenched
salt & pepper to taste
2 to 3 garlic cloves
1 tbsp of Dijon mustard
1/4 cup (about) of extra virgin olive oil
breadcrumbs

Season the lamb with the salt & pepper. Mince the garlic in a small food processor, add the mustard and olive oil and combine thoroughly. Spread the mixture over the lamb and between the chops. Sprinkle with breadcrumbs.

Roast in a preheated 350F oven about 25 minutes. Breadcrumbs should be toasted and lamb should be pink on the inside.

Mashed potatoes with garlic cream- adapted by me

4 or 5 red potatoes or 2 or 3 russet potatoes, peeled and cut in chunks

4 or 5 garlic cloves peeled

salt

3 to 4 tablespoons of butter

1/4 to 1/3 cup cream, half & half or milk

Freshly ground black pepper

Put potatoes and garlic cloves in a medium saucepan. Cover with water and add salt to taste. Bring to a boil, lower the heat and cook at a simmer until potatoes are soft. Drain the water and mash the potatoes and the garlic. Add the butter and mash that in; add the cream or milk and mash until the desired consistency. Cook over low heat stirring until smooth. Taste for seasoning and add additional salt if needed and freshly ground black pepper.

Creme Reversee au Caramel - adapted from Le Cordon Bleu at Home
4-cup mold

Preheat oven to 350F

Caramel
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup water

Combine the sugar and the 1/4 cup of water in a small saucepan, bring to a boil over low heat stirring to dissolve the sugar. Raise the heat to high and cook, without stirring, until the syrup turns a light caramel color.
Remove from heat, pour the caramel into the mold and quickly tilt the mold so the caramel coats bottom and sides. Put mold aside and let cool.

Custard

2 cups of milk
1 1/2 tspns vanilla extract
2 eggs
4 egg yolks
2/3 cup sugar

Put the milk and vanilla into a saucepan and bring to a boil; remove from heat. Combine the eggs and yolks in a heatproof bowl and whisk to blend. Whisk in the sugar, gradually add the hot milk whisking constantly but gently so the mixture doesn't become frothy. Pour the mixture into the cooled mold. Put the mold in a deep baking pan and pour hot water into the pan to go about 2/3 up the mold. Bake in the oven 40 to 50 minutes or until a knife inserted into custard comes out clean (more like 60 to 70 minutes)

To serve run the tip of a small knife around the top of the custard to loosen. Invert a serving platter over the mold and quickly reverse the two. Remove the mold. Voila!

And we didn't have to get all dressed up

and Max just wondered, "why are they so happy? must be cause I'm here!"

Gee, my Mom looks 29.

Julia et moi

Being unemployed I have a tremendous amount of time on my hands. In fact I find the best thing about it is how time passes so slowly; the days don't just fly by like they normally due and then we find ourselves saying "wow, where did the week go?". This also has it's drawbacks, since I don't have a job or many foreseeable prospects in this crappy job market I can't really enjoy all that slow moving time as much as I'd like to. I find myself worrying a lot, which takes up a lot of time. I also find myself looking for things to do, namely all those things I've always been wanting to do when I'm at work and wish I could do if I had more time. Yes, this is quite the conundrum. So being that it's Summer, I thought I would spend more time out in the garden but the truth is the garden pretty much takes care of itself; I do most of the needed planting in mid May and then it just sort of grows and blooms and so forth. The only work needed is the occasional weeding and trimming which doesn't take up that much time and the weather has been kind of all over the place, too hot to be outside, too rainy to be outside or I'm to "worrying" to be outside being frivolously gardening. Since my real favorite thing to do is cook I decided the best way to pass the time is baking. But then it occurred to me that if I bake every day in about a week we won't fit through the door; unless of course I bake bread. I love baking bread, I love the process, the kneading, the rising, the punching, the second rising...Most of the breads that I've baked in the past are focaccia, English muffins and a yummy braided olive bread that we'll talk about some other time, on occasion I've made challah. So I decided it was high time I made the ultimate of breads, the french baguette. And that's where Julia comes in. As most people of my generation the first cooking show I ever watched was  The French Chef with Julia Child.  This was way before the Food Network came along and the term celebrity chef and all those idiots who wear the title. Julia, first and foremost, was a cook (I'll also give kudos here to two other "cooks" from PBS: Pierre Franey and Jacques Pepin ), celebrity was not in her vocabulary. And what a great cook, also a bit of a kook, she was. As a lot of people learned from the movie Julie and Julia she specialized in French cooking so where else could I possibly turn that to that book

Mastering the Art of French Cooking. There are two of these, volumes 1 and 2, and I have owned them for close to twenty years. I am embarrassed to say that I have NEVER EVER made one single thing out of either book. While I adored watching Julia and sometimes emulating her, her recipes in these books are daunting. She explains and explains and explains, and what she's explaining a lot is French cooking technique; a tad overwhelming to say the least. My hat goes off to this Julie person for attempting to make all the recipes, she clearly had more time then me. However I plunged in and seven hours later I had made two very decent French baguettes. I will not copy the recipe for two reasons, one I may get sued by a big powerful publisher for copyright infringement and two, it's six pages long (see what I mean?) I will post pictures instead:

The dough, ready for it's first rising:

the shaped baguettes, ready for it's third rising before going in the oven

The baguettes just out of the oven

The baguettes cooling

The Max waiting for a piece of bread, his absolute favorite food in the whole wide world  

I think I'll try Brioche next.

Bon appetit!