Served with homemade crackers and wilted zucchini ribbons.
I like to make things from scratch, especially when they involve learning about a new process or technique that I didn’t know about before. I have a great, reliable cracker recipe from Alton Brown, and I was looking for another course for an Italian-ish meal I was making for friends in New York. So, I figured this would be a good opportunity to try making ricotta cheese.
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Lemon chicken in the top of the oven, and sprouts roasting below.
From right to left: parrano, stilton with lemon peel, gorgonzola, and a goat cheese with pepper. Accompaniments of homemade crackers, beet jam, and cucumber jelly.
I didn't know this is how brussels sprouts grow!
The roasted sprouts.
I recently had a couple of friends over for a Sunday night dinner. Being somewhat short on time, I had to make dishes that led to good results in a time-efficient way.
So I chose (a) a cheese plate with some cucumber jelly and beet jam, (b) rosemary-lemon chicken, and (c) tres leches cake, which I served with a raspberry sauce and maple-glazed almonds.
Everything came out really well. For the cheese plate, I tried to focus on picking a variety of cheeses that would go well with the accompaniments. In this case, I was serving another dinner the next day, so I’ll write about the cheese plate in more detail when I write about that dinner. The beet jam and cucumber jelly I’ve made before, as well as the crackers, though for different purposes.
The chicken was pretty easy to make, and searing and then putting in the oven ensures that it gets nice and crispy on the outside without too much risk of overdone-ness. I’m not sure that baking it with the lemons and rosemary on top actually does anything for the flavor, though it was speculated that the rosemary and lemon might release some of their essential oils into the sauce. Not convinced.
I realize now that I’ve never written an entry about tres leches cake before, though it’s a recipe I make relatively often since it’s straightforward, and a crowdpleaser. Next time I make it, I promise a proper entry on the topic. In the meantime, if you haven’t had it, it’s basically a very light sponge cake that is soaked overnight in a mixture of evaporated and condensed milk, served with whipped cream (hence “three milks”). The result is a very satisfying, sweet, and obviously incredibly moist cake. The accompaniments, especially the fruit sauce, work really well with its sweetness.
I served the chicken together with some brussels sprouts, by the way. I had never seen this before, but at Trader Joe’s they were selling them on the stalk! I actually preferred this since the sprouts stay fresher longer, and they’re a lot cheaper this way. I roasted the sprouts until they were crispy and then served them with a bunch of salt, sort of like healthy french fries.
Cracker dough.
A finished cracker.
Straining out the cucumber juice.
A piece of cured trout, which I am about to slice into gravlax. Gravlax literally means "grave fish", as it was originally produced by burying salmon
The completed dish, together with a little bit of creme fraiche.
(Note: This is a followup to this post.)
This recipe gave me the chance to do a few things: cure some fish, make jelly from scratch, bake crackers, and in the end assemble an impressive-looking dish relatively cheaply.
I made the crackers a few days before the other components of the dish. Alton Brown’s recipe (which is what’s linked above) requires only 8 ingredients that are all combined together and then baked.
The result is a delicious, very hearty cracker with lots of poppyseeds and sesame seeds. These are also cheap to make, if you can get the seeds cheaply. I made I think 10 crackers at a cost of about $4, which beats grocery store prices, and that would come down if I had a cheaper source for the seeds.
The next day, I started on curing the fish. The recipe calls for arctic char as a substitute for salmon, but the char itself was unavailable, so I used trout (which is related). The trout is packed in lots of salt, some sugar, and dill, wrapped up tight, kept in the refrigerator for 2 days with a light weight on it, and flipped occasionally.
The salt draws out the moisture from the fish, making it inhospitable to microorganisms, and quite delicious to humans. In the picture, you’ll see a cured piece of trout after the process is over. An astroturf-like blanket of dill and salt has been scraped away. Even after it is unpacked, the fish will keep for a little while because of the salt that has been absorbed into it.
One note of caution is that the fish has to be wrapped carefully, as the liquid from the fish will almost certainly leak out otherwise.
Finally, the day before I was ready to serve I made the cucumber jelly. Jelly’s interesting because you can make it in almost any flavor, and so it opens up lots of culinary possibilities. In this case, I just had to puree some cucumber, strain it, then add gelatin. I put it in ramekins to set, and then when I was ready to serve, I warmed the ramekins up a little bit to get “pats” of cucumber jelly that could stand alone so that their bright green color showed through.
You have to be really careful with gelatin, as it melts easily. Fortunately, as I learned, if you accidentally melt too much of it you can set it back in the fridge to set again (though you can only do this once without adding more gelatin). Once it’s out, the trick is to handle it assertively as one piece. What I mean is, if you try to pick up one side of a pat of jelly, it will break. But if you can move the whole thing at once, by e.g. flipping it into your hand, you can slap it down with a reasonable amount of force without fear.
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