Summertime Sweets

Tonight's dinner was super simple...we threw some steaks on the grill and mixed up a simple salad (for those of you at home playing the 2 Hungry Hearts drinking game, take a drink every time we make a simple salad) of green leaf lettuce and sliced fennel...all items from our share.  We topped the salad with some toasted walnuts, and dressed it with olive oil, white balsamic vinegar, some thyme and fennel fronds.  The sweetness of the white balsamic balanced out the fennel quite nicely.

But let's get on to the main event.  If you thought the salad and steak were easy, wait till you feast your eyes on this dessert.  It couldn't be simpler!

We only had 2 stalks of rhubarb, so we tossed in some quartered strawberries too.  Strawberries and rhubarb are a winning combination; the sweetness of strawberries balancing out the tartness of rhubarb.  Since we had the strawberries, we just cut out some of the sugar the recipe called for.  Anyway...just chop up the rhubarb and strawberries, and toss with a bit of lemon juice and sugar.

In a separate bowl you'll make the topping.  Rather than just use panko, as the recipe calls for, we also threw in some oats, along with cinnamon, nutmeg, ground ginger, and some Chinese five spice, since we didn't have allspice on hand.

Butter the bottom of your baking dish, and spread some of your topping on the bottom to make a nice little crust.  Then layer on your strawberries and rhubarb so they're evenly distributed.  Top it off with the rest of your topping, along with your chopped almonds.  Then cube up some butter and dot the top.  Make sure the butter is spread out evenly too, so it melts over the whole dish.

Then just pop it into a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes.  You want the filling to start to bubble, and the top to be golden brown and crisp.  Let it cool for a few minutes, and then dig in! As our friend Jeffrey Zakarian would say, "Yummy!"

Mardi Gras-nukah!

Its a new holiday...like Festivus!  Since we got oysters in our share again, and we still had sauerkraut lingering in the fridge, we thought we'd make po' boys again.  We followed the same protocol as the first time around.  Justin took care of shucking the oysters again and we came across this little fellow

 

So you're probably wondering what this little guy is.  We thought it was a little worm that found its way inside the oyster.  With a little research we learned that its not a worm at all, but an enzyme complex that's formed by the oyster when its been actively feeding.  So really, this is just a sign of freshness.  As if we needed another sign.  I mean, when I opened the bag of oysters and clams, they smelled like the salty ocean.  Anyway...since this wasn't a worm, and just confirmation of how fresh our oysters were, we marched on!

One thing I forgot to mention last time was that when we started building our po' boys, I pulled out some of the bread on the bottom bun to form a bit of a trough.  This gave the oysters a place to nestle in the bun...as if the oysters and bun were cuddling.

It made it a whole lot easer to keep the po' boy together once we topped the oysters with the 'kraut and top bun.  The oysters didn't squish out when you bit into the sandwich, and everything just stayed in place.

So that's the Mardi Gras part.  As for the -nukah part, we decided to make some sweet potato latkes.  With the start of Chanukah this past weekend, we thought it appropriate, and a nice compliment to the po' boys.  I turned to my trusty friend, Gojee, for a recipe and found one for sweet potato latkes with chipotle sour cream.  It was a fairly easy recipe too.

The sweet potatoes were grated and mixed with the eggs, flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, cayenne, some caramelized onions, baking powder, and since I didn't have cumin I used a little chili powder.  I covered the bottom of a pan with some oil and started dropping the latkes in for a shallow fry.

Just a few minutes on each side got them crispy and brown.  Once they were done I just placed them on a cooling rack over a cookie sheet, and kept them warm in the oven while the rest of them, and the oysters cooked.  This kept them from absorbing the oil, and allowed them to stay crispy!  The chipotle sour cream was super simple...all you need is chipotle and sour cream...duh!  Well, I couldn't find chipotle sauce (as the recipe called for), so I picked up a small can of chipotle peppers in adobo.  So I chopped up about 4 peppers and added that to the sour cream with some of the adobo sauce until it tasted perfectly smoky and spicy.  So the latkes got a dollop of chipotle sour cream and some cilantro and green onion.

And to cap it all off, we paired the po' boy with a Flying Dog Pearl Necklace Oyster Stout.  The beer is brewed with the same Rappahannock oysters we ate!  It turned out to be such a tasty and hearty dinner.  Happy Mardi Gras-nukah!

Holy Cannoli!

We'll keep this one short and sweet.  Short, since I can link to past posts for the dinner portion, and sweet since we made cannolis!

We got another spaghetti squash from the CSA last week, and we have some leftover meatballs from a past dinner, so that's what we threw together tonight.  Here's our spaghetti squash and meatball how-to.  We did have to make some sauce, so we made a puttanesca-esque sauce.  Sweat out some onions and garlic, add baby bellas and anchovies (these were in oil with capers), toss in a can of tomatoes (preferably San Marzanos), and top with some chopped basil and parsley.  Since we had some parmesan rinds hanging out in the fridge, we threw one in to help thicken the sauce, and add a little cheesyness.  Then you can just let it simmer until you're ready to serve.  Super quick.  Super simple. Super tasty!

Now for the cannolis!  We had some leftover ricotta from our gnocchi, so what better way to use it up than by making dessert?  Honestly, I'm not much of a baker.  I don't have the patience to precisely measure each ingredient, and sift things.  Plus, I tend to gravitate towards salty snacks over sweets.  I prefer the creativity of cooking, where I can add a splash of this and a dash of that until it tastes right.  I leave the baking to my mom.

They took a little more time and work than we thought, but we pushed through!  While Justin manned the sauce, I prepped the cannolis.  For the dough, all you need is flour, salt, sugar, an egg, and some dry white wine.  The only white wine I had was some delicious chocolate flavored wine I'd picked up a couple years ago at the Virginia Wine Festival (If you've never gone, you should definitely check it out!).  We thought it'd add a nice subtle chocolate flavor to the shells.

Once the dough was wrapped up and in the fridge to rest, I moved onto the filling.  I let the ricotta drain for a bit, and then added powdered sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg (since I didn't have allspice), grapefruit zest (since we didn't have a lemon) and some whipped cream (you just need soft peaks when you're whipping the cream).  This sat in the fridge to set up while we ate our sketti squash and meatballs.

Once we were through with dinner, it was time to make cannolis!  Not to be confused with this guy.  We floured the counter and rolled out our dough while the oil heated up.  Its best to get the dough really thin.  We used the bottom of a bowl as our stencil, and cut out circles of dough.  Each circle was wrapped around a little wooden dowel that we found and dropped into the hot oil.  It only took a minute or two for them to fry up, but we got into a groove and knocked out the shells. 

Since we had some extra mint in the fridge, we chopped some up and added it to the filling for a little fresh, brightness.  I made my own pastry bag by dumping the filling into a big ziploc bag and cutting off one of the corners.  This will let you easily pipe the filling into the shells.  Once they had cooled down and were easy to handle, each shell was filled with the ricotta mixture.

During one of our last trips to Trader Joe's, we were roaming the aisles and came across a spice grinder that contained sugar, coffe and chocolate.  We looked at each other, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, knowing we had to get it.  And what better use for it than to top our cannolis?  We ground some into a little dish and dipped each end of the cannoli into the delicious powder.

It really tied in the chocolate wine that was in the shells, and brought out the cinnamon and nutmeg that were mixed into the filling.  Ok...so maybe this post wasn't as short as I thought it would be, but it certainly was sweet!