Rosemary and Ricotta Tart

This tart was inspired by a dessert we had at Contigo in San Francisco. I based the filling on a ricotta/pine nut tart found in Mario Batali's book, Molto Italiano, and the crust is from Michael Ruhlman's book, Ratio.

If you can't find a meyer lemon, use half of a normal lemon. I used Bellwether Farms sheep's milk ricotta, but a cow-milk ricotta would work too.

This is best made in a 9" tart pan, but a pie tin will do. If you use a pie tin, the filling will come up halfway. After it is done baking, carefully trim the crust to be level with the filling. If you're feeling particularly lazy, you could use a store-bought pie or tart crust.

Crust

9 oz All purpose flour (a scant 2 cups)

6 oz butter (1 1/2 sticks)

2 tbsp sugar

2-3 oz cold water (1/4 cup plus 1-2 tbsp)

pinch of salt

pie weights (1/2 lb dry beans)

Filling

1-2 tsp fresh rosemary, finely chopped

8 oz ricotta cheese

1/4 cup of honey

1 small meyer lemon, or half a lemon

2 eggs

pinch of salt

Make the crust: Mix the flour, sugar, and a pinch of salt. Cut up the cold butter into chunks and work into flour and sugar, until you have pea-sized chunks. Try to use a squeezing rather than a rubbing action, so you don't heat up the butter too much. Add 2-3 oz cold water and mix to combine. I used almost 3 oz, but the dough was a little to sticky.

Form into a flat disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 15 minutes.

Roll and blind bake the crust: Flour your counter and rolling pin, and roll out the dough until it's about as thick as pie crust. To get it onto the tart pan, roll it onto your rolling pin and then unroll it over the pan. Trim the dough, leaving a little bit of overlap around the edges to account for shrinkage.

Cover with the dough with tin foil and add the pie weights. Bake for 15-20 minutes at 375°F. Remove the tin foil and weights.

Assemble the tart: Meanwhile, mix all of the filling ingredients together - I used a tsp or two of finely chopped fresh rosemary. Add both the juice and the zest of the lemon. Taste it and adjust with salt, honey, and lemon juice if necessary. There should be a subtle sweetness.

Pour the mix into the tart shell and bake for 30-35 minutes. The crust should be golden brown. Allow to cool on a rack, then trim the crust to be level with the filling. (Emily saved the extra bits of crust for her morning tea the next day.) Cut into slices and serve with a drizzle of honey.

This can be served at any temperature, but I think it'd be best served warm with a quenelle of ice cream or crème fraîche.

Update: This didn't set up the second time I made this, not sure why. I'll update this post if I figure out the issue.

Valentines Day Dinner

We celebrated Valentines day at home this year, and I had a lot of fun putting together a special dinner for it. It helped that the 14th fell on a Saturday, giving me a nice, leisurely day at home to put dinner together.

Oysters and Pearls

Sabayon of Pearl Tapioca with Malpeque Oysters and Osetra Caviar

For a starter, I made Oysters and Pearls again - it's a great dish and the oysters and caviar seemed appropriate for Valentines day. We made this dish last year for Valentines day and once last October. It's a great dish and most of the work can be done ahead. (At serving time, you bake it in the oven briefly and make a beurre blanc.) We also enjoy having the leftover caviar, crème frâiche and chives on crackers as a snack.



Black Sea Bass with Sweet Parsnips, Arrowleaf Spinach, and Saffron-Vanilla Sauce

The main course took us a little longer to narrow down. We wanted something light, since the Oysters and Pearls is rather rich. We eventually settled on this dish from the French Laundry cookbook. It turned out really well, and we'll definitely be making it again. There are a lot of different flavors in this dish that play off each other really well.

The sauce is a saffron/vanilla infused mussel broth, finished with a little cream and butter. On top of that is a parsnip purée. The purée is topped with a ball of spinach, and finally there is a a fillet of black sea bass. There is a more detailed description of the construction of this dish on Carol Blymire's blog.



Coconut, Meyer Lemon, and White Chocolate

For dessert, Emily suggested a dish that she found on Cannelle et Vanille, a food blog. It consists of alternating layers of a coconut cake and meyer lemon custard, surrounded with white chocolate and topped with some fruit. I was a little hesitant about the dessert at first because it called for tempering white chocolate and wrapping it around the dessert, and pastry work is a little outside my comfort zone. The chocolate ended up nice and crisp, so I think I pulled off the tempering correctly.

Venison Loin with Potato and Celery Root Gratin

So, there is this venison dish that I'd been meaning to make ever since we saw the "Furred Game" episode of "Jamie at Home," but I never got around to it.

This Saturday we went to Ferry Building to see if we could find some venison loin (aka backstrap). Golden Gate Meats did have it, but it was not cheap (very not cheap). We bought it anyway. While we were there, we also picked up some Rancho Gordo beans and some Boccalone guanciale and prosciutto cotto.

I ended buying 1.5lb of venison loin. I cut it in half and saved one piece for another meal. I oiled the remaining piece and crusted it with a mixture of rosemary (obtained from a nearby bush), juniper berries (from the store), salt, and pepper. Then I seared it and roasted it for about 10 minutes, turning once. For the sauce, I deglazed with a little red wine, reduced it, and mounted with butter.

The side was a gratin of potatoes and celery root, cut into thick disks, par-boiled, and baked with sage, cream, and parmesan. I then topped it with more parmesan and browned the top.

The dish turned out really well, it was worth the expense. The meat was perfectly done all the way through, and the flavor of the crust nicely complimented the flavor of the meat. I thought the sauce had some bitter notes (I got some singed garlic in there), but Emily said it was fine.

The gratin was also tasty, but I think the sauce could be refined a little - it tasted too much like cream for my tastes. At the very least it could use a little nutmeg, possibly a second cheese, and maybe a dash of wasabi or curry powder. (Compare Keller's cauliflower gratin.)

We frequently make venison burgers, but this was the first time I've eaten a venison steak since I was very young. It was also the first time I've worked with juniper berries - they have an interesting flavor that seems to go well with the rosemary. I look forward to using them in the future.

Our Wedding

So much has happened since my last post that I don't really know where to start. Generally I'm inspired by Emily's photographs, but in the last couple of weeks she's taken about five thousand of them - this is going to take a couple of blog entries.

First things first - we're now married. We had a lovely wedding, which went perfectly. I was expecting something to go wrong - they say it always does - but it was great. People had fun, the setting was beautiful, and our dance worked out well.

Emily will go into better detail on her blog, but here is my summary:

We had an intimate wedding at the Acqua Hotel in Mill Valley, about 40 people were able to attend. The wedding was outdoors, on a lovely little lake with the mountains in the background.

The rehearsal dinner was down the street at Buckeye Roadhouse - a place that we happened across a few years ago after hiking in the Marin Headlands, which turned out to be in the list of top 100 bay area restaurants. They did an excellent job, details to follow.

It was a little cool out, but the guys didn't notice in their tuxes. After the ceremony, there was a cocktail hour, which started a little earlier than planned. During that time, Emily and I had photographs taken. After the cocktail hour, we had a sit-down dinner catered by Piazza D'Angelo in Mill Valley.



After a bit of mingling, we had our first dance, a foxtrot choreographed by Alyson - the part of the wedding I was most nervous about. It went really well, despite a couple of missteps on my part and Emily having the extra difficulty of dancing in a wedding dress. Learning the dance was a lot of fun. Alyson did a really good job teaching us the dance and designing a beautiful and cute dance that matched our skill level. (I got the easy part.)

The cake was beautiful. Emily had gotten a spiced "Carrot Cake" from the Shannie Cakes. She did the cake tasting with Alyson, so I hadn't tasted it before the wedding. When we did the cake cutting, I decided that the cake was really good and we should do a second take. I'm sure the photographers appreciated it.

There were a lot of people who were unable to make it - travel has gotten expensive and budgets have gotten tight - but the size was really nice. We were able to spend a lot of time with each guest, eat our entire meal, and have a fun, relaxing time. We hope to have a reception in Michigan around the holidays to catch up with some of the people who couldn't make it.

After the wedding we spent the night at the Acqua Hotel, got up the next morning and got ready for our honeymoon on the big island of Hawaii.

to be continued...

Got my Goat

Confit of Goat Ribs with Ratatouille

So I finally got around to making the "Colorado Rack of Lamb" dish from the third season of Top Chef. I saved the recipe back in October, with the intention of making it. I quickly made the olive oil poached tomatoes with a roast chicken, but didn't get around to making the whole dish.

Last April, when Rich was visiting, I bought a half rack of goat to use for this dish and then realized that it was a summer dish (summer squash, tomatoes, etc.) - it has been sitting in my freezer since. In the last few weeks, I'd been looking for the "white anchovies" called for by the recipe with no luck.

By now I'd been almost regretting this - I'd put it off enough that expectations were raised so high it was bound to disappoint. Still, I picked up some zucchini and eggplant at the farmer's market on Thursday and started thawing the ribs. Saturday morning, I got some heirloom cherry tomatoes, and a spherical yellow summer squash that I can't identify.

That night, I put the herb rub on the ribs and decided that they needed to be trimmed. They weren't quite frenched the way I wanted. I tied them and put the rub on and left them in the fridge overnight. I was a little burned out, so I decide to make the sauce Sunday morning (the recipe specifies that it sit overnight).

For the sauce, I used some anchovies that I cured a few weeks ago. I had picked up some fresh anchovies from a farmer's market when I was returning from picking up our marriage license and cured them that night per the instructions in the Zuni Cookbook.

Sunday night, I put everything together. I brought the duck fat, the rub from the ribs, and some of the sauce to a simmer in the smallest pan that would fit the ribs, seared the ribs, and put them in the fat and turned off the heat. They finished cooking while the fat cooled down kinda like cooking sous vide without the bag. After 25 minutes the oil was down to 135 degrees, and the ribs were perfect. Meanwhile I made the eggplant sauce and cut up the squash.

In the end, the dish was very good, although it took a bit of duck fat to make. I may make the dish again someday, if I've got enough duck fat on hand. I do reuse the fat from my confit, so I may have it at some point in the future. (I wouldn't reuse the fat from this dish, too much random stuff in it.) Otherwise, I'll definitely reuse some of the components.

The Sauce Vert was tasty and would make a very good dipping sauce for bread - if I dial back on the garlic a little.

The eggplant sauce would also be good paired with the right dish. I'll have to figure out what to pair it with.

wagyu fajitas

So now we've finally got a picture of the fajitas, one of our regular dishes. I saw the wagyu skirt steak at the grocery store and decided to make some fajitas with it. The marinade I use is lime juice, soy sauce, chili powder, rice wine, and a bit of sugar. I roast and slice poblanos, slice some onions, then use a stir fry method to make the fajitas.  It's not entirely traditional, but it works.

 

The Usual Suspects

I was looking through Emily's flickr images and thought I'd throw together an overview of the dishes that are currently in our regular rotation.

Fusilli Carbonara

Our Fusilli Carbonara comes from the book Italian Easy. Their recipe substitutes fusilli for the traditional spaghetti and prosciutto for the traditional guanciale or pancetta. The smaller pasta is easier to eat and the sauce sticks to it nicely. Recently, we've been using Boccalone pancetta in lieu of the prosciutto.

Chile Verde

We usually serve Chile Verde when we have company, especially for mexican-themed holidays. It's a pork chili with tomatillos and roasted poblanos. It started as my attempt to reproduce a dish from a mexican restaurant in Vegas.  I've posted a version of the recipe is posted on recipezaar.

Chicken Roulade

The chicken roulade is a Gordon Ramsay recipe that I adapted to our tastes. It is a boned out chicken leg and thigh wrapped with prosciutto and stuffed with sausage, currants, and shallots. I serve it with a cheesy risotto. It's a regular dish, but I'm still tweaking the sauce.

Onglet Bordelaise

Steak Frites is another regular at our house. We make it almost weekly. The recipe is loosely based on the steak frites in the book Bouchon. My changes are to make the sauce à la minute, scale back on the butter a little, and add some more shallots. I like to use onglet for this, but occasionally use skirt steak. (The original called for bavette.)

Sushi

We have sushi at home once a week. Typically it's salmon rolls and sashimi, california rolls, and oysters. I'm still looking for a good source for sushi quality hamachi nearby.

Pizza Margherita

We usually have pizza margherita for lunch on the weekends.  We have a couple of basil plants that we harvest and use a local buffalo milk mozzarella. It's much better in the summer, when the tomatoes are in season, but I have a source for local hot-house tomatoes in the off season. 

Rigatoni con Salsiccia

A few years ago, I found the recipe for rigatoni with sausage in Tastes of Italia magazine, and it's been in our regular rotation since. The rigatoni is served with arugula and a simple sauce of tomatoes, garlic, sausage, and balsamic vinegar. (I don't have an Emily photo of this, so I included an old one that I took in Vegas.)

Steak Fajitas

Steak Fajitas is another regular dish, but we don't have photos of it.  I typically use skirt steak, marinated with lime, soy, chili powder, and some sake or sugar water. I stir fry it with onions, roasted poblanos, and serve with tortillas,  black beans, and crema.

Pumpkin Penne

The pumpkin penne recipe originally came from Rachael Ray. It's penne served with a sausage and pumpkin sauce. We've had bad luck with Rachael's recipes in the past, but we like this one.