400 Visitors and Facebook Page

La Piccina Cucina hit 400 new visitors this month, and I decided to celebrate by making it its very own Facebook page. At facebook.com/piccinacucina you can become a fan, browse pictures and watch for new posts, share your own recipes or tell me how to improve mine, and easily link to this blog to find recipes.

Of course, you can always follow the blog directly - or you can just check in from time to time as the mood strikes!

To food!

Peach Hand Pies

(filling and concept adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

I've been wanting to make hand pies ever since the first time I heard the phrase "hand pie". There is something incredibly appealing about that term - it just sounds so comforting and delicious. So when I found myself with more fruit than I could possibly eat before it went bad after a fruit-picking (apples, peaches, and asian pears!) trip to a local orchard, it was time to fulfill the dream, as it were. And this time, I remembered to use my mom's much-easier-and-equally-delicious crust recipe, this time. Bonus!

FILLING
2 pounds of peaches
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup sugar, plus - I used more because my peaches weren't quite ripe
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon bourbon, if you have it - I used drambuie
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Peel and chop the peaches into small chunks. Mix them with the flour, sugar and pinch of salt, and add the drambuie and vanilla. Add more sugar to taste. Set aside for awhile if you have the time - I let them sit for about an hour plus.

CRUST
1 1/2 cups flour
1 stick butter, cut roughly into tablespoons
1-2 tbsp sugar
1/4 cup cold water

EXTRAS
1 large egg + 1 tbsp water, beaten - to act as the glaze
Extra sugar for dusting

The less you handle the crust mixture, the better - it makes for a flakier crust. Combine the flour, sugar, and butter in a bowl, and mix with your hands until fluffy and combined. Add the cold water, and again mix with your hands until you have dough that you can roll out. Add flour if it's getting too sticky.

Place floured wax paper on your counter and roll out the dough on the paper (lightly flour the rolling pin, too) until it's about the thickness you want for your crust. Use a bowl to cut out circles of dough. My first roll-out made about three rounds - I prepped those, then rolled out the dough again and repeated the process. Do this until you've used all your dough. I had seven and a half pies by the end; I also had leftover filling. (If you want a bigger filling-to-crust ratio, you might make them larger so as to fit more filling.)

The filling process works this way: place your rounds of crust on an ungreased baking pan/sheet. Brush the circumference of each with your egg mixture, then spoon in some filling on one side of the round. Fold the other side of the round over the filling, and press the edges of the crust together. Use the back of a fork to make a design on the edges, and poke a couple of holes in the crust with the fork. Then, lightly brush more egg mixture over the top of the pie, and sprinkle with a little sugar.

Once the pies are filled, place them in the fridge for about 20 minutes while you preheat the oven to 375. Then place the baking sheet with the pies in the oven and cook until golden brown, about 20-30 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool a bit. Then enjoy - eat them right from your hands!

Sauteed Pork Chops and Chickpea Salad

(Chops from Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything: Quick Cooking)

I don't think I've ever cooked pork chops before. But I couldn't resist Mark Bittman's foolproof recipe, nor could I resist two pork chops for $2.78. The chops were easy, juicy, and delicious, and I made up the salad using whatever we had in the house - turned out great, and a nice complementary side to boot. We'll definitely be making pork chops a major part of our menu these next couple years!

PORK CHOPS
Here is Mr. Bittman's recipe:

2 center-cut loin pork chops, about 1 inch thick
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1/2 cup chicken stock (you can use water as an alternative)
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar or freshly-squeezed lemon juice
Parsley leaves for garnish

Sprinkle the chops with salt and pepper. Place a large skillet over medium-high heat for 2 or 3 minutes. Add the 2 tablespoons olive oil; as soon as the first wisps of smoke rise from the oil, add the chops and turn the heat to high. Brown the chops on both sides, moving them around so they develop good color all over. This whole process should take four minutes or less.

Reduce the heat to medium. Add the wine and the garlic and cook, turning the chops once or twice, until the wine is all but evaporated, about 3 minutes. Add 1/2 cup of stock or water, turn the heat to low, and cover. Cook for 10 to 15 minutes, turning the chops once or twice, until the chops are tender but not dry. When done, when you cut into them, the color will be rosy at first glance but quickly turn pale.

Remove the chops to a platter. If the pan juices are very thin, cook, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan, until the liquid is reduced slightly. Then stir in the butter over medium heat; add the wine vinegar, pour over the chops, garnish, and serve.

SALAD
1 can chick peas/ceci beans/garbanzos, rinsed and drained
1/2 small red onion, chopped
Handful of green beens, cooked or blanched, and chopped
4-6 baby carrots, sliced thinly
1 clove garlic, minced
1 spoonful balsamic vinegar
2 spoonfuls olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Combine all your ingredients in a bowl, mix, and serve!

Toasted Vegetable Frittata

I've been wanting to make a frittata for awhile, and lunch today was a great opportunity. Cooking for lunch feels like such a novelty. This was fun and really could take on tons of alterations - different cheeses, different veggies, different herbs, etc. Had it with a little arugula/balsamic/olive oil salad on the side. Here's what I used for one (and half of it filled me up):

4 eggs
Salt
Pepper
A pinch of dill
A pinch of paprika
A splash of half-and-half
Half an orange bell pepper, halved again and sliced
1/4 a white onion, halved and sliced thinly
1-2 tbsp olive oil
A few leaves of arugula
A few thin slices of cheddar cheese
Parmesan cheese

Combine the eggs, a little salt, a little pepper, your pinches of dill and paprika, and a splash of half-and-half in a bowl and whisk together, then set aside. Put a small frying pan over medium-low heat and place a square of aluminum foil in the plan, then put your onions and bell pepper on top of the foil and sprinkle with salt and ground pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until they start to get brown around the edges. Then, in another larger (but not too large) frying pan, drizzle just a little olive oil and add the onions and pepper to that, over medium-high heat. Stir it around once or twice and add your egg mixture evenly around the pan. Place your arugula on top of the egg mixture in the pan, then arrange the cheddar slices evenly on top of that.

Watch for the edges of the egg to start to set, then lift up a side and tilt the pan to let the yolk run under the part that has started to cook. Do this on several edges, several times. It's OK if you don't cook all of the yolk during this part.

Turn down the heat just a little, sprinkle the top with parmesan cheese, and put a lid on the pan. Allow to cook until the top of the egg gets puffy (the bottom will brown, but don't let it burn). Transfer to a plate and serve!

(Alternately, if you have an oven-proof frying pan, you can put the egg in the oven briefly rather than covering it with a lid on the stove. Again, you'd wait until it got puffy - and in the over it would probably nicely brown a bit on top.)

(Almost) Pasta Primavera

Says Joef, "If it's good enough for us to eat, it's good enough to post!" There's nothing particularly fancy about this dish - sort of a "what's-left-in-the-fridge" kind of deal - but Joef makes a good point, and it was certainly good enough to eat. I call it *almost* pasta primavera because it's close to a delicious dish my mom makes that has similar ingredients, but adds mushrooms (recommended), for one - and some other veggies that I'm forgetting at the moment. Anyway, the point is that you can improvise, and the results will all be good.

2-3 cloves garlic, chopped
Olive oil
Handful and a half green beans, cleaned and broken into pieces
4-5 on-the-vine tomatoes, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
Parmesan cheese for serving, grated
3/4 lb pasta, like mezze rigatoni

Get your water boiling and cook the pasta as you cook the sauce. Olive oil (yes, that's a verb now) your pan over medium-high heat. Add all the ingredients, minus the pasta and the cheese, to the pan (if you want crunchier green beans, add those a little later). Cook them until the tomatoes are breaking down; reduce heat if necessary. When the pasta is done, add it right to the pan and cook a minute on low. Serve with plenty of parmesan.

Lemon Chicken

(adapted from my father, SPQR)

We should probably find another name for this dish that more adequately captures how unbelievably delicious it is. Chicken Scallopini with Lemon? With Lemon-Butter Sauce? Getting closer. Anyway, growing up it was lemon chicken, so lemon chicken it shall remain.

This was one of my most frequent requests for birthday meals at home. And it very nicely fits our current meal requirement: low-budget. Got flour? Lemon? Butter? Done. Plus, check it out - I actually made a balanced meal, with sides and veggies and everything! It's not just pasta!

So, here's what you need for two people:
2 decently sized/thick chicken breasts (or 3 smaller ones, or 3 if you're just really hungry), thawed
Flour
Salt
Pepper
2 tbsp butter, divided
Olive oil
1 large lemon

(Sides: I made the rice and asparagus first so I could focus on the chicken. If you're better at timing things than I am, you could of course do them all at once. I blanched the asparagus, drizzled it in olive oil, and sprinkled it with a little salt.)

The first step is to turn the chicken into scallopini. The key is really to have a good, sharp knife. Place a chicken breast on a cutting board, put your hand on top of it, and slice it sideways to make very thin filets. You'll end up with some small pieces, some long, some large - this is fine. Just make sure they're thin.

When that's done, put some flour on a plate and dust each filet with flour individually on both sides. You want it coated, but not thick - just a thin layer of flour around each filet. Set those aside.

Take a large frying pan, nonstick preferred, and drizzle a couple/a few tbsp of olive oil into it along with 1 tbsp of butter. Turn the heat to medium-high and let the pan get hot. Add a little salt and black pepper.

When the pan is good and hot, use tongs to cook batches of the filets/scallopini. They will cook FAST. Flip them so they cook on both sides. Remove the cooked filets from the pan and set them aside on a plate (in the winter, to keep them warm, you can put them on a plate in the oven).

Once all the chicken is cooked, squeeze the juice of one lemon into the pan you just used - keep the heat the same. Also add another 1 tbsp of butter. Stir around to combine and melt, then add all the chicken back to the pan and stir around to coat the chicken on both sides. Transfer to a serving plate, add more salt if you want, pour the sauce from the pan over it, and garnish with parsley.

Cheddar, Ham, and Shallot Quiche

(from "Comfort Food" by Rick Rodgers)

There was a Partners' Club brunch for School of Management students (Joef) and their partners (me) on Saturday, so I got to go back to this always-satisfying cookbook and page through all the delicious-looking breakfast recipes therein. I landed on a Gruyere, Bacon, and Leek Quiche recipe, and modified it only slightly, using cheddar, ham, and shallots as my filling alternatives. The results were, well, yummy.

About 10 minutes in to making the dough, I remembered that I'd told myself that from now on, I wouldn't use the Williams-Sonoma crust recipe, but that I'd switch to my mom's much simpler and equally, if not more, delicious one. Unfortunately, it was too late for me - but not for you! I've provided the recipe for the crust I used below, but just go to the Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie recipe and you'll find the simpler alternative. I assume that you will still want to do the pre-cooking of the crust with the pie weights - just keep an eye on it to make sure it's not getting over-cooked.

Finally, I was amazed to see that a whole quiche, which I always saw as egg-dominated, only takes two eggs. Who knew?

CRUST (Complicated Version)
1 1/4 cups flour
1/4 tsp sea salt
5 tbsp unsalted butter, chilled
1 tbsp vegetable shortening, chilled
1/4 cup ice water

Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl. Cut the butter and shortening into smaller chunks and use a pastry blender, two knives, or your hands to combine the butter/shortening with the flour until it forms large, coarse crumbs.

Drizzle the ice water over the flour mixture and toss with a fork until you have moist clumps. Then form the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes or up to 2 hours.

FILLING
1 cup chopped ham
1 tbsp unsalted butter
1/3 cup chopped shallots
1 cup half-and-half
2 large eggs
1/2 tsp salt, optional
1/4 tsp freshly-ground black pepper
1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
1 cup cheddar cheese, shredded

Place your dough on a lightly-floured surface and dust the top of the dough with flour. Roll it out to about 12 inches in diameter, 1/8 inch thick. Transfer to a 9-inch tart pan and fit the dough to the bottom and sides of the pan. Trim the sides of the dough that form an overhang, but leave enough to fold back into the pan and press it firmly against the inside rim of the pan (you're basically making the sides of the quiche double-thick). The crust should rise about 1/8 inch above the pan rim. Line the dough with aluminum foil and freeze for 30 minutes while you make the filling.

Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 375. You'll want to use a rack in the lower third of the oven. When the crust is done freezing, you'll place the pan on a baking sheet and fill the foil with pie weights (or dried rice or dried beans). Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the dough is just beginning to brown.

For the filling, fry the chopped shallots and chopped ham in 1 tbsp of butter over medium-high heat until the shallots begin to soften. Set aside. In a bowl, whisk together the half-and-half, eggs, salt, pepper, and nutmeg until combined. Set aside.

Remove the crust from the oven and remove the foil and weights. Scatter the ham and shallots evenly into the crust, then do the same with the shredded cheddar. Then pour in the egg mixture, spreading it evenly. Return to the oven and bake until the filling has puffed and become golden brown, about 30 minutes.

(Not Just ) Another Tomato Sauce

Alright, it kind of is just another tomato sauce. Another delicious tomato sauce, though, and one that's cheap to make and uses some of the same ingredients that you happen to have lying around the house after making, say, bolognese a couple nights before. This one, my own frequently-changing recipe, uses a few more veggies and is a little chunkier than Smitten Kitchen's simplest tomato sauce, to provide a differentiator.

I actually didn't decide to post this until after I'd finished my first helping. But it was such a crowd-pleaser that I decided to use the excuse of a photograph to take a second helping.

You'll need:

1/2 a white onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, chopped/minced
Roughly 6-8 baby carrots, thinly sliced
1 stalk of celery, thinly sliced
3 Roma tomatoes, chopped and lightly salted (new trick I discovered tonight)
olive oil
Dried (or fresh) basil)
1 tbsp butter
1 regular can tomato sauce
1 lb spaghetti rigati, or similar pasta
Salt to taste

Combine the onion, garlic, carrots, celery, tomatoes, and a sprinkle of dried basil in a sauce pan or dutch oven with a liberal drizzle of olive oil. Sautee and stir occasionally over medium-low heat, adding the butter a few minutes in, and until the vegetables begin to soften. Then, add the tomato sauce, a pinch more dried basil, and salt according to your taste. Bring to a boil then simmer, covered, over low heat for about 20 minutes, or while you've boiled water and cooked your pasta. Serve over pasta, with grated parmesan, if you have it.

Aglio, Olio, e Zenzero (Spaghetti with Garlic, Olive Oil, and Ginger)

(from Loukie Werle's "Italian Country Cooking")

The first meal we made in our new apartment was bolognese, but this was the second: a twist on aglio e olio that adds ginger. This was good on its own, and would make an even better accompaniment to a main meat (steak/chicken) dish. And, of course, it's fast, inexpensive, and easy.

(I also have to gush for a minute about our new kitchen table/shelving from Ikea, and how the lighting in this kitchen is somehow less yellow than before - hooray!)

1 tbsp or so dried parsley (handful of chopped fresh, if ya have it)
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
4 large cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1/4 tsp red chili flakes
1-3 tbsp fresh ginger, finely chopped
1 lb spaghetti rigati or other similar pasta

Start a pot of salted water boiling. Then combine the parsley, olive oil, garlic, chili flakes, and ginger in a large pan and cook over low heat until garlic is golden - don't let it brown/burn. Cook the spaghetti in the boiling water until al dente, then scoop out a cup of the pasta water and reserve before draining the pasta. Add the pasta right to the ingredients in the pan and mix, adding pasta water gradually if it gets dry. Done!

La Piccina: Camping Edition

This year's trip to the Boundary Waters was quite the culinary adventure, mostly thanks to my fellow campers/portagers. We had fresh-caught bass and northern pike, steak, bacon, fresh raspberry and blueberry pancakes, and - blueberry compote (or, in camping terms, blueberry "sauce"). Of course, we had our fair share of pastaroni and grilled summer sausage (delicious, actually), too. But considering it's a pack-in, pack-out kind of deal, we did pretty well. Well enough to deserve a special camping edition post.

Dinner: Steaks with Carrots, Potatoes, and Onions
Pat had the brilliant idea to bring some fresh foods in for the first night. He devised a freezer system using a brown box, ice, and plastic garbage bags to keep the steaks and bacon cold. We sauteed - or directly grilled - the steaks over the fire, then ate them with a side of potatoes and carrots sauteed with onions and a little cajun seasoning. A perfect way to round out a day of canoeing!

Breakfast: Bacon
There's not really anything unique about bacon, and there's certainly no recipe. But there are no WORDS for how delicious bacon is when you're camping.

Breakfast: Pancakes
We could've had pancakes every day if we hadn't run out of Hungry Jack and Krusteaz towards the end of the trip. The best part was picking fresh raspberries and fresh blueberries to put in the batter (all you need is water to make a great pancake). And of course we packed syrup. Innovation of the trip: summer sausage cooked INTO a pancake.









Breakfast: Blueberry Compote


But we didn't need syrup when Justin and Joef figured out we could make our own from fresh blueberries, sugar, and water. Proportions are about 1:1 for the blueberries and water, then add sugar to taste. Wash the spider eggs off the blueberries, then combine all ingredients in a pot over the fire and bring it to a boil. Boil it down, occasionally mashing the blueberries against the side of the pot. Add a splash of whiskey with a couple minutes left to boil if you're feeling adventurous.


Lunch and Dinner: Fried Fish
Catch a fish, gut it, bread it in Shore Lunch, and drop it in extra-hot oil and you're done. On the last night, we used the oil we fried the fish in to make crispy tortillas (just drop the tortilla in the oil, watch it puff up, flip it, then put it directly on the grill for a couple minutes). Tony divided his up into wedges and actually made tortilla chips.




























And finally - well, this isn't exactly a recipe, but...Joef made a sauna. Yes, a sauna. Using downed tree limbs gathered from a neighboring island, tarp, twine, some tape, and large granite rocks heated for two hours in the fire. Just pour water over the rocks and you're good to go.

Hummus!

Aaaaaaand we're back! Back means we successfully navigated the Boundary Waters and have now moved into our new place in New Haven, CT. First-time east-coasters, are we. The best part so far is our ability to WALK to anything and everything. Like for ice cream, after dinner. Fantastic.

Of course, we're still Midwesterners at heart. So consider this hummus, which I confess to making when I was still in Madison, a tribute to our true home.

This was not as good as my Aunt Wendy's hummus, but it's a good start, and not too tough to make. I suggest starting with the below and modifying it to taste and texture as you go.

2 cups (aka two cans) chick peas/garbanzos
1/2 cup tahini, technically, but in this case - 1 oz sesame seeds and 1-2 tbsp sesame oil
3 cloves garlic
juice from 1 lemon
Salt, pepper, and paprika to taste

Start by making a paste with mortar and pestle of the sesame seeds and sesame oil to imitate the tahini. Then combine the ingredients (minus the paprika, salt, pepper) in a food processor and blend, adding more (regular) olive oil and/or water if it gets too thick. Add salt and pepper to taste

Finish with paprika sprinkled over the top. Again, taste and modify with lemon juice and oil (sesame or olive) to adjust the taste/consistency. Serve, of course, with pita.