Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Mary,

Just make your own ricotta and let it drain for a while. It gets much drier the longer you let it drain.

Amy

Paul - thanks for the broth recipe - I used it last night to make a Japanese chicken noodle soup (with Soba noodles) and it was really good. I did cut back a little on some of the amounts since this was a soup and not a dipping sauce, but the flavor was right on.

My project has been delayed a bit. The day I wanted to make the meat pies, my daughter wanted to invite some friends over to eat nachos and watch Germany's Next Top Model (I know!). So this cookbook is going to still be up next week as well. I am obviously not too strict about my own rules so I probably won't work up the level of anxiety that would propel this to a Julie and Julia-type book-movie deal. No problem, obscurity becomes me.

I did make that artichoke pie yesterday though. No home made cheese (is this shocking from the person who recommends hot gluing gingerbread houses?). I did use fresh artichokes instead of frozen and sliced them on my mandolin. It was fantastic, a really great vegetarian main dish. I think it would have been fine without the eggs as well but it did look great with them. I invited some friends over and served it with a salad. It is a calorie bomb so it doesn't need much with it. The recipe was pretty well written, although it did that thing where you had to refer to a part of another recipe but I managed.

I made CI's lemon panna cotta for dessert. A very good recipe, it used less gelatin than most recipes so was creamier but still held its shape well. I had some rhubarb in the freezer and , channeling Kathy, used it to make some compote to serve with it.

Mary

Tonight I did the Turkish meat pie. A pizza-type dough topped with ground lamb mixed with chopped tomato, onion, allspice, cinnamon and cayenne pepper. Pretty nice. I was a bit nervous about the dough, it seemed awfully dry, but it was not bad. Probably my fault as I I used pizza flour instead of normal. It was good for a week night. The dough had to sit half an hour and the topping went together quickly. Thumbs up from the family so it will probably go on the rotation. I may check out other recipes for this though, I think it could be better.

I will let you know when I pick the next book.

Mary

It ain't really cheatin' - - -

I subscribe to the NYTimes online so my 'contribution' this week comes from that honorific 'book'....

MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN posted 2 recipes on April 2&3: and both were superb. Over the past week I have tried a variety of fish in each sauce as well as scallops in one. Last night I combined the two sauces and just did scallops one more time. Each was excellent except for my efforts with albacore and salmon - neither really clicked, nor does she recommend either.

Both start with letting the fish rest in the juice of one half lemon, salt and pepper. Concurrently you are prepping a tomato-based sauce. Then one is baked with the sauce over the fish while the other is simmered with the fish laid on top.

These are two of the very few recipes I've ever tried that did not require any adjustments. Having made them 3x I feel very confident in recommending them. One last endorsement - I'll be serving them to guests

Looks wonderful. I used to make a Greek baked fish quite often, with tomatoes, onions and feta. I might have to bring it out of retirement.

Lucky guests! Do you always do a dry run before making something for guests? I tend to use my guests as guinea pigs.

Mary

Yes, I do tests of all new recipes so that I can "Winoize" them Generally, I find they have too much salt and not enough garlic
Overly long cook times and consecutive steps rather than concurrent ones (are you listening CI?) are another big problem.

If CI were listening, we wouldn't be here...

Mary,

Thanks. I haven't tried the artichoke pie yet.

Okay, so I decided to do recipes from The Foods of the World series. First up, The cooking of Italy. If you're not familiar with the series, Time/Life would get a writer who was at least somewhat familiar with the area and a bit of a foodie (Sorry, gourmand) and they would send him out to eat a lot and write about it. In this volume we have Waverly Root chowing his way across Italy. I've read a few of these books and they tend to fall into two categories -- the travelogue with food and the hilarious personal anecdotes by a white person who actually lived in the culture for quite a while. This one is the former. I've also never read one of these books that doesn't have to contain at least one lengthy comparison of the cuisine in question with French food. Mr. Root comes to the conclusion that Italian food is more uniformly delicious than French food, suffering neither the depths of French cooking nor achieving the summits, or something like that. Anyway, he gives us a brief history lesson and then we are on to the eating! And the drinking! Waverly seems to really love the food and to always be mildly surprised when the wine is drinkable. The books is a bit of a time capsule. It gently teases the North American reader about his lack of knowledge when it comes to pasta shapes and there are barely two paragraphs about balsamic vinegar and zero recipes that use it. All-in-all, though it was an enjoyable read and it gives a nice overview of Italian cooking circa 1967.

So, for my first dish I chose Trotelle alla Savoia. Then I immediately subbed some free bluegill for the trout. My Italian is pretty meager. I think that Trotelle alla Savoia translates as "Savoy Trout". It made more sense when I read that the recipe consultant was one Luigi Carnacina, a guy who (among other things) used to manage the Savoy in London. At any rate, the "trout" was very tasty, and the recipe was quite simple and easy to follow. And here's a pic-- Sorry about the quality. It was the best I could do with my son's V-tech Kidizoom camera.