Month: February 2016

Goat Cheese and Mixed Green Pasta

Good cooks need a few dishes they can make from memory. Things that can save the day on a busy week night when you know you have nothing at home and want to quickly walk into a store and grab what you need and go. This pasta is one of those dishes for me. The idea came from Giada de Laurentiis and I don’t think I’ve changed anything about it, but at this point I’ve made it so many times I can’t remember for sure. It is one of those dishes that can accommodate basic swaps easily, a key skill for a cook to learn. To look at a recipe and see shallot and know onion will be okay or to see spinach and know you’d prefer kale or that in a pinch swiss chard would be just fine, that’s when you go from an okay cook to a better cook. This was one of the first I did that with.  The principal is fairly simple.

Ingredients: Small pasta of your choice (I like orecchiette, which I think is what Giada used), log of goat cheese, mixed greens.

That’s it.

The steps are pretty easy too.

  1. Cook pasta according to package directions
  2. Drain, keeping a bit of the pasta water aside for making a sauce
  3. Put pasta back in warm pot you cooked it in
  4. Add the greens and use the warmth of the pan and the pasta to wilt them
  5. Add the goat cheese use the ration of about a 1/2 ounce cheese per ounce of pasta
  6. Add the pasta water just a bit at a time. This turns the goat cheese to a sauce and helps with any greens that need more wilting, stop adding it when the dish is as saucy as you want it
  7. Finally top with tons of fresh ground pepper, this is the main seasoning for the dish, so don’t be shy
  8. Ta-da lunch or dinner is served

Goat cheese pasta with mixed greens.

Other cheese can be used or other greens. I will warn you that while cubed fresh mozzarella does work it will clump together and you won’t get a saucy dish it will be a bit more like mac and cheese, which is never a terrible outcome if you ask me. It will however make cleaning your pan a task likely to ruin a sponge, so proceed with caution on that cheese substitution.

 

Bundt Cakes – Success, mistakes, and final victory

A number of years ago I made a New Years Resolution that I’d highly recommend to any cooks who claim to not be bakers – I resolved to “become a baker”. And I was successful, perhaps too successful. I conquered scones, biscuits, yeast dough, and even bread. I became the go to cake baker and found a carrot cake recipe that my dad requests for any and all events where he’s the guest of honor (Father’s Day and his birthday especially). Before that year began I made a bundt cake using the pan one of my very best friends got me as a wedding gift.

This first bundt cake was perfect –

First perfect bundt cake

And so was the second –

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That whole year of becoming a baker I made no other bundt cakes, clearly I’d already conquered it. Then last April I decided to rebel from my dad’s request and make him a root beer bundt cake. It was decidedly unperfect. It was so unperfect it had to become a trifle as no portion came out of the pan into anything that looked like a cake. And that trifle was great, nobody refuses cake chunks integrated with cream cheese frosting, or at least nobody I know.

Then, I gave up for months. The worst thing you can do in cooking or baking is follow an almost failure turned improvised success with inaction. I didn’t want another disaster on my hands.  Then for aforementioned dinner party I made another – it was okay. Not perfect, but not an epic disaster. It did not come out in one piece, but it could be salvaged and pieced back together. I was getting closer! That began a string of bundt failures as I hoped to edge closer to success. The most epic failure looked like this…

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That’s when I decided no amount of greasing or letting it rest was going to work. We needed to look at other failures and learn from their mistakes and methods. One popular method involves a combination of resting and steam. You boil water in a kettle and then you dump it all over a dish towel. The methods diverge from here some suggest draping it atop the pan and others suggest sitting the bundt on top of one – for maximum success I did both. And again it was closer, but not there yet.

That’s when I caved and ordered a fancy baking spray from Williams Sonoma. As far as I could tell this is a common bundt pan issue. The first 2-3 are perfect and then something goes awry with the coating. I was admitting semi-defeat and enlisting more professional tools. And you know what – it worked.

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The moral of the story is twofold and both are classic life lessons. 1) If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. 2) Good tools may not be everything, but they sure can help.