Nuts!

Sweet 'n Spicy Almonds actually.

I loooove me some almonds - raw, roasted, Blue Diamond, in cookies, cakes, pastry, savory, really whatever, I just love them. So, while I was poking around, killing time that I should have been writing in, I came across this recipe on one of my favorite food blogs. Joy the Baker is lovely by the way, and her recipes are always great, so if you're at all into baked goods and haven't checked her out, I really recommend it.

For the Sweet 'n Spicy Almonds, I took her basic recipe and changed a few things in the spicing, mostly because the original called for fennel and James doesn't like fennel. The result is almond-flavored crack - sweet, and yes, spicy in a really neat, almost buttery-hot way. Give 'em a try - they're stupid easy to make, quick and a big ol' treat.

Ingredients:

- 2 cups raw whole almonds

- 1/3 cup sugar

- 2 tbs. water

- 1 tsp. red pepper flakes

- 1/4 tsp. ground black pepper

- 1/4 tsp. cinnamon

- a nice pinch of ground clove

- a very small pinch of ground cardamom

- a smallish pinch of ground ginger

Process:

1. Preheat the oven to 400. Cover a baking sheet with foil and spray with cooking spray.

2. Put the spices, sugar and water in a medium bowl and combine. Add the 2 cups of almonds and toss to coat.

3. Pour the almonds and all of the mixture onto the baking sheet and put it in the oven, on the center rack. Leave in for 5 minutes. At 5 minutes, pull them out, stir them around and then put them back in for 17 minutes. Keep a close eye on them, and stir them every five minutes or so.

4. After 17 minutes, the almonds should be a dark golden color. Pull them out of the oven, but leave them on the baking sheet. Separate them from each other with a fork and let cool.

5. When they're cool, the sugar and spices will have formed a shiny shell around the nut. Put them into a airtight container and they'll stay fresh for weeks, although this last bit is theory. Between Father's Day and my unholy addiction, they barely lasted the week-end in our house.

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Buttery Cauliflower Prosciutto Pasta

Hmm. I make a lot of pasta. Or, at least, I post a lot of pasta. I think this is because pasta is one of those intuitive things for me. Some people have grilling, some people have casseroles, and it seems my thing is pasta. I may need to expand a bit. In the meantime, however, here's a lovely, simple recipe for a quick, fairly inexpensive week-night supper for two. This one's totally out of my own head, although I got the inspiration from a cauliflower side dish recipe in Andrew Carmellini's new book, Urban Italian, which, by the way, I can't wait cook the hell out of.

Ingredients:

- 2 large cloves of garlic, minced or passed through a garlic press

- 1 small shallot, sliced

- 3-4 tbs. butter

- extra-virgin olive oil

- 1/2 head (about 4 cups) cauliflower with the florets cut into rough, half inch slices

- 2 cups dry pasta (I used campanelle, but any heartier shape will do - no angel hair though)

- 8-10 slices of good prosciutto, cut into broad, 1 inch pieces

- salt

- pepper

- 1/4-ish tsp. dried dill.

- sage. If you have fresh sage leaves, awesome. If you don't (because really, who has those just hanging around on a Thursday night) you can 1/8 tsp. dried.

*Prep all of your ingredients first because this moves kind of fast once you get going.

Process:

1. Fill a pot with water and 1 tbs. of salt and set to boil. Cook the pasta until al dente, reserving 1 cup of pasta-cooking water when you drain it. Don't rinse the pasta, just put it back in the pot and cover it - you want the starches to help the delicate butter sauce stick.

2. While the pasta's cooking, melt the butter in a 12 inch saute pan. Wait until it gets foamy.

3. When the butter is foamy, add the shallot and garlic. Cook until fragrant - about 30 sec.

4. When you can start to smell that killer butter/garlic smell, add the slices of cauliflower. Cook with the shallots and garlic, stirring frequently, for about two min.

5. When the cauliflower is starting to look slightly softer, but is still very, very crisp in the mouth, add salt and pepper to taste (easy on the salt since your pasta will be nicely salted), the dill and the dried sage (*of you're using fresh sage leaves, put them in, whole, with the shallot and garlic - you'll remove them later). Add a good dash of olive oil and continue to saute for about 4-5 min. - until the cauliflower is just starting to soften.

6. Add the reserved pasta water, 1/4 cup at a time, to the saute. You don't have to use all of it, just put in enough so that the saute turns into a delicate sauce with a consistency you like. Turn the heat to low and allow to continue cooking for 1-2 minutes.

7. When the cauliflower and sauce are done, the sauce should look lightly milky and the cauliflower should be softened, but still firm. Pour the sauce over the pasta and stir until it's all coated.

8. Add the slices of prosciutto and stir again.

9. Serve warm with a good parmesan and a big appetite. It's surprisingly filling and the savory, buttery, salty goodness is hard to put down.

Safari Upgrade

I just down loaded a Safari upgrade to Dot, my Macbook, and don't like it much... grumble. Now instead of just quietly doing its search-engine thing, Safari is making suggestions and offering options and just overall being a little more interactive than I necessarily want it to be.... grumble. I'm such a curmudgeon.

Survival Skills

So, Photon tends to eat really quickly and then throw whatever it is that he ate. Usually it's dry food, which gets disdainfully walked away from. Today it was his super-favorite-chickey-mush that got the regurgi-cow treatment. Here's his response:

HORK!!!!!

Photon blinks and looks at me.

Phot: Oh. But I wanted that....

Photon takes a tentative sniff.

Phot: Well, it still seems kind of ok...

Photon takes a nibble.

Me: Oh my god! Don't - ugh!

Photon: What? Waste not...

Vespers wanders by.

Vespers: Hey, watcha got? Is that your food? You get to eat it twice?!? No, fair - I want some. 

Vespers tucks in next to Photon. I go make muffins in disgust.

At least they're not going to starve....

Existential Blues

I've got 'em. Or maybe it's just the existence blues. Whatever it is, I'm tired of hearing about little boys killed by bullies in suburbs, American reporters sentenced to 12 years hard labor in North Korea for unspecified crimes, and the general lack of compassion human beings have towards one another - this includes me. I feel like I'm sitting on a raft in the middle of a sea of ugly, and all I can do is acknowledge it and ride it out. At least it doesn't have a leak....

New Review Up

A review for The Compassionate Carnivore by Catherine Friend is up on The Foggy Foot Review. Come carnivores and omnivores and vegetarians alike!

The New Sherlock Holmes Movie

So, there's a new Sherlock Holmes movie coming out, directed by Guy Ritchie and staring Robert Downey Jr. as the eponymous hero. Jude Law is playing Watson. So far so good right? Promises not to be a redux of all those silly Basil Rathbone films....

But here's the thing. I saw a trailer a while back and doesn't seem to resemble anything that might have sprung out of Arthur Conan Doyle's brain. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing - I like gritty, dark interpretations of Victorian crime solving (From Hell was awesome). But I do feel that if you're going to appropriate someone else's characters, especially one as beloved as Holmes, then you have a bit of a duty to interpret that character through the lens of the original work. 

This isn't to say that you have to slavishly do what everyone else has done, but there are certain things about Holmes that make him Holmes. For example, Holmes is not socially at ease. In fact, he's a pre-Autism portrait of a brilliant, autistic savant. He's a hard, controlled man who puts his work and his intellect above the expression of human emotion. He does drugs because he gets bored and depressed when he's not working. 

The Holmes that I'm seeing in the trailer is a Holmes that bare-knuckle boxes in pits for fun (granted, the Holmes of the canon is able to box and swordfight and do martial arts, all very well, but one gets the sense that it's for practical and cerebral purposes of discipline and not because of raw, animal combativeness). The Holmes of the canon does not dally with women. In fact, there is only one woman in the entire series of stories that makes an impression - Irene Adler. She appears in one of the first stories and then is never seen again. In the trailer, we see Holmes and the actress playing a re-written Irene Adler seriously going at it, we see Holmes entirely at ease handcuffed and naked in a bed, we see him quipping and generally very socially fluid. This just isn't the taut, razor-minded detective that I've come to associate with the name Sherlock Holmes.

Granted, this is only a trailer and I haven't seen it yet, so the jury is still officially out. But let's just say that I'm not as excited as I wish I was.....

Spaghetti with Garlic, Breadcrumbs and Fried Egg

This might sound a little weird, but it's delicious - serious, quick comfort food. I came home from work starving and, because James had a migraine, looking at dinner for one, so I tried a riff on a recipe I've been wanting to make for a while. Apparently, this is actually a fairly traditional dish from somewhere in Italy (if I were really cool, I'd research where, but I'm just too tired).

Anyway, this whipped up really quickly - about 20 minutes from start to finish. The portion sizes adjust easily and you can do pretty much everything to taste. This is the basic recipe that serves four, but I quartered it and was super satisfied. 

Just a reassuring note: It might not be totally intuive to put fried eggs over spaghetti, but there's a long and happy Mediterranean tradition of putting fried eggs over starch. I still love putting fried eggs over leftover arroz con pollo because that's how we always ate it when I was a kid. There's just something wonderfully comforting about the way the creamy yolk coats the starch. It's just a warm and cozy taste. The spaghetti with garlic and breadcrumbs is good on its own, but the fried eggs take to a whole 'nother level that I really recommend. 

Ingredients:

- 1 lb. dried spaghetti (shapes are ok too)

- 5 cloves of garlic, minced or passed through a garlic press

- extra -virgin olive oil

- 1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes

-1/4 tsp. salt

- pepper to taste

- dried or fresh parsley (if using fresh, chop fine)

- two eggs

- shredded parmesan cheese

- fresh breadcrumbs

* A note on breadcrumbs: If you don't have fresh lying around, I would skip them altogether rather than use the canister stuff in this case. Fresh breadcrumbs are super easy to make. Just get some good bread, rip it up and put it into a food processor with some salt, pepper and olive oil. Process until the bread becomes roughly crumby. Spread the crumbs onto a baking sheet and toast the in an oven at 35o degrees until they are golden and toasty. Let them cool and then store them in the fridge or freezer. I usually make a whole bunch and use them over the course of a few months. Just be careful while they're in the oven - they go from toasty to burned really quickly.)

Process:

1. Bring water and 1 tsp. salt to boil in a nice sized pot. Put in the spaghetti and cook until al dente. Reserve 1/2 cup pasta water. Then drain the pasta and put it back into the pot, with a sprinkle of olive oil so it doesn't stick to itself.

2. Heat about 3 tbs. of olive oil in a non-stick skillet until it shimmers. Put the garlic, 1/4 tsp. salt, parsley (if using dried) and red pepper flakes into the skillet and cook on low until the garlic is golden and sort of sticky. You'll know it's done when the garlic starts to foam. 

3. Pour the garlic mixture over the pasta. Toss in some parmesan and the breadcrumbs to taste, mix it up and put the cover over the pot to keep it all warm.

4. Put about 1 tsp. olive into the pan and bring back up to heat. Crack two eggs into the pan and sprinkle salt and pepper to taste over them. Cook on low, covered, until the whites are firm but the yolks are still gooey (this is very important because the yolks become part of the sauce). You should use about two eggs per helping / person.

5. While the eggs are cooking, serve up the spaghetti in bowls. If it's too dry, sprinkle pasta water onto it until it loosens back up. If you're using fresh parsley, sprinkle it on now. If not, don't.

6. When the eggs are done, slide two on top of each helping of pasta. Serve immediately. I like to go "MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!" when I break the egg yolks into the pasta, but I leave that up to you.