Blue Cheese Dressing

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If it is possible to be in love with a salad dressing, then I am head over heels for blue cheese dressing. It is my decadent treat at home-style Italian restaurants and steakhouses. But it’s even better to make at home, because then you can ensure you get lots of blue cheese goodness, and you can eat the batch all week. This dressing not only works on salads — I recommend romaine hearts, croutons, tomatoes and bacon — but it also makes a good dip for crudites and chicken wings.

Blue Cheese Dressing

Makes about ¾ cup

• 2½ ounces blue cheese, crumbled (about ½ cup)
• 3 tablespoons buttermilk or substitute whole milk, if you must
• 3 tablespoons sour cream
• 2 tablespoons plain yogurt (you can also use mayonnaise, but I prefer yogurt)
• 2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
• ¼ teaspoon sugar
• ⅛ teaspoon garlic powder
• Salt and ground black pepper

Mash the blue cheese and buttermilk or milk together with a fork until the you’ve achieved the right crumbly-creamy texture to suit your tastes. Stir in the remaining ingredients. Add salt and pepper to taste. Refrigerate in an airtight container up to 1 week.

Old-fashioned American Potato Salad

I know, summer is almost over. You don’t have to tell me. But we have one more holiday weekend, which means we can have one more barbecue, which means we can make one more potato salad. Hooray!

This is my absolute favorite potato salad recipe. It tastes much like the beloved Southern-style potato salad my grandma used to make, complete with hard-boiled eggs. Yet it is very amenable to adaptations, depending on what you have on hand to throw into it. (Bacon is always a good choice.) I think the essential ingredient that makes it so tasty is the vinegar. The warm potatoes are tossed with the vinegar before being dressed, so they have some time to absorb its flavor. This gives the salad a tang that contrasts nicely with the creamy mayonnaise dressing.

The original recipe comes from Cooks Illustrated‘s The New Best Recipe, but as I say, it is a classic and belongs in your recipe notebook. Feel free to substitute freely.

American Potato Salad

From The New Best Recipe. Yields 4-6 servings.

• 2 pounds red potatoes (about 6 medium or 18 small), scrubbed
• ¼ cup red wine vinegar
• Salt and ground black pepper
• 3 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and cut into ½-inch dice, or 2 slices cooked bacon, crumbled
• 1 medium celery rib, minced (about ½ cup)
• 2 tablespoons minced red onion
• ¼ cup sweet pickles, minced
• ½ cup mayonnaise
• 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
• 2 tablespoons minced parsley leaves

Cover the potatoes with 1 inch water in a large pot. Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer, stirring once or twice, until the potatoes are tender, 25 to 30 minutes for medium potatoes or 15 to 20 minutes for small potatoes.

Drain; cool the potatoes slightly and peel if you like (I rarely bother). Cut the potatoes into cubes while still warm.

In a large bowl, add the potatoes, vinegar, ½ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper, and toss gently. Cover the bowl and refrigerate until cool, about 20 minutes.

Toss the potatoes with the remaining ingredients and season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate for up to 1 day.

How to Cook Without a Book

One of my cooking goals this year has been to cook more without using recipes. I do love cookbooks. I browse through them frequently and use them to come up with new ideas. I also enjoy challenging myself with difficult or new recipes when I have the time, usually on the weekends.

But during the week, when time is at a premium and energy is often at a low, I find it’s easier to cook without consulting a cookbook. I started seriously teaching myself how to cook about three years ago, and now I’ve reached the stage where I feel very comfortable winging it. Here are the keys to success that I have learned along the way.

The first is to learn some basic cooking techniques. While books on techniques are readily available, I’ve found that cookbooks that contain a lot of simple recipes are the best teachers. I highly recommend Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and Cooks’ Illustrated The New Basic Recipe, especially for learning basic methods of cooking meats and vegetables.

But don’t try to memorize every possible cooking technique. Sure, there are 101 one ways to cook chicken, but you don’t have to know them all. Instead, after sampling a few different ways of cooking a particular ingredient, pick one or two that you like best for the ingredients you cook most frequently. For instance, I like asparagus pan-roasted. I’m probably not going to bother steaming it, although that’s a fine way to cook it. For ingredients like chicken, I have 3 or 4 techniques in my repertoire, depending on whether I’m cooking bone-in pieces, boneless breasts or cutlets.

I keep a cooking notebook, where I list all the ingredients I usually buy, plus notes I’ve collected about them — including my favorite techniques for cooking that ingredient. This is also a good place to record notes on storage, freezing and any special prep required for that ingredient.

Next, develop a repertoire of key recipes, what I call master recipes. These should be recipes that you really like, which cook quickly and can adapt to whatever you have on hand. In my repertoire are a few soups, a handful of pasta recipes, an easy fish dish, and some one-dish meals like a stew, risotto, burritos and frittata. Although I prefer simply cooked vegetables or one-pot entrees, I also have a few side dishes in my roster, including some basic salads, a couple of potato dishes and a vegetable gratin.

Even though these recipes are easy to memorize, I record them in my recipe notebook in case I need to review the details. I rotate through them depending on what I have on hand to cook with, but I always make sure I have the foundations for my master recipes in my pantry.

The third key is to understand what flavors go together, especially when seasoning the dish. The Flavor Bible is a terrific reference. It lists pretty much every possible ingredient and the foods, herbs and seasonings that go best with it. You can pick and choose based on what you have and what you like.

Cooking this way makes grocery shopping a lot easier. I no longer make a list composed of what’s called for in the recipe, regardless of whether it’s in season or way too expensive. Instead, I look for produce that’s high-quality, in season and therefore usually cheaper. And I know that I need to replenish any foundation foods, dairy, eggs and meat when we’re running low and stock up when they’re on sale. I also treat myself to one or two cheeses — usually on sale — that will go well in salads or for snacking.

On the weekends, I spend some time making foods that will make it easier to cook during the week. For instance, I prep produce: washing, peeling, slicing. I also make a batch of chicken stock, a bottle of salad dressing and a loaf of bread or some pizza dough. I may make a sauce or pesto if I need to use up some surplus. This helps me avoid buying the packaged versions of these foods.

So I may not be posting as many recipes on this blog, since I am not cooking as many recipes anymore. Please share your tips for cooking without a book in the comments.

Keeping Kitchen Staples Fresh

Here’s a useful article from Cooks Illustrated: Keeping Kitchen Staples Fresh. Advice on how to store and when to throw out staples like flour, sugar, oils, leaveners and nuts.

Speaking of Cooks Illustrated, I stopped getting their magazine but some of their special issues are very useful indeed. I just picked up a copy of Make-Ahead Recipes (check the magazine stand), which is just what it sounds like. The batch of freezer biscuits I made from their recipe was terrific, and it’s very convenient to have a dozen or more biscuits ready to go from freezer to oven without having bought any packaged foods.

Dutch Baby & Focaccia

A genuine Dutch Baby.

For Sunday breakfast yesterday, I made a Dutch baby. This is a kind of pancake that is cooked in the oven so it puffs up like a giant popover. Once you take it out of the oven, it deflates quickly, but it is very light and sweet, delicious with powdered sugar and fresh strawberries. I’ve made something like this before, but I didn’t realize then that its real name was Dutch baby.

For my Sunday afternoon baking project, I made rosemary focaccia. I love focaccia and will eat it for breakfast, sandwiches, snacks, anytime. It’s like pizza without all the stuff. The recipe I tried was from Cooks Illustrated and called for a potato. I’m not sure it was the best recipe for focaccia out there, and I would like to experiment with other takes on it before committing to a go-to recipe.

Review: The Best 30-Minute Recipe

Cover of The Best 30-Minute Recipe

The Best 30-Minute Recipe is another compendium of thoroughly researched recipes from Cooks’ Illustrated, but I don’t think it is one that will remain in my permanent collection. While I did learn some good time-saving techniques — such as cooking pasta in its sauce — many of the recipes were simply variants of dishes I already know by heart, such as frittata, or dishes I already know how to cook better, such as pan-roasted chicken breasts.

But a larger problem with this and other Cooks’ Illustrated cookbooks is that they don’t reflect the way I like to cook. Many recipes rely too heavily on high-fat ingredients, which I don’t like to use in everyday cooking, or on convenience products like quick-cooking rice, which I don’t use in my kitchen. Some recipes require the microwave, a tool I don’t even own anymore. But the intangible issue is that the recipes just don’t seem to have a lot of soul. Perhaps it is possible for a recipe to have been tested too many times.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some very good dishes in here. But on the whole, The Best 30-Minute Recipe doesn’t really belong in my kitchen, or probably in the kitchen of any serious cook. Even if you are pressed for time, you can surely find more creative and fun ideas elsewhere.

Would You Do This? Cherry Tomato Salad

Image by freakgirl via Flickr

The cherry tomatoes have been going gangbusters this year. We’ve gotten so many that I hardly know what to do with them all. I have been eating them every day and giving them away, and still there are more to use up.

Yesterday I wanted to make a quick and easy lunch, and pretty much all I had to eat were cherry tomatoes and cheese. I noticed a recipe in a recent issue of Cook’s Illustrated for cherry tomato salad, so I decided to check it out to see if it had anything new to offer.

Once I read the recipe, I knew it was a deal breaker. Because cherry tomato salads are way too juicy–or so the article claimed–the recipe called for first spinning the quartered tomatoes in a salad spinner to remove all the pulp. Then you had to cook the pulp with the oil and vinegar to create the salad dressing.

Maybe this technique is super-delicious. I’ll never know, because I won’t go through all that just to make a salad. Would you?

I never had complaints about cherry tomato salads being too juicy before. I just didn’t realize this was a big problem. I think the pulp is the best part of the cherry tomato. Eating a cherry tomato right off the vine is like eating candy. In fact, that’s often how I do eat them, handfuls out of the bowl, like candy.

Here’s how I made my cherry tomato salad: simply and quickly. It was a wonderfully juicy, flavorful salad that was ready in 5 minutes and made a great lunch. You could also use it as a pasta sauce or topping for bruschetta.

Cherry Tomato Salad

Time to make: ~5 minutes

1. Halve enough cherry tomatoes to feed the people you’re feeding (about 1 cup per serving).
2. Sprinkle with salt to taste.
3. Toss the tomatoes with a small amount of olive oil and balsamic vinegar until well coated (eyeball it–I used about ½-1 tbsp. of each per serving).
4. Sprinkle with minced basil and crumbled goat cheese or a similar cheese.
5. Serve.

Cooks Illustrated Cracking Down on Food Bloggers

I was a little shocked to see this post over at Alosha’s Kitchen. The gist of it is that she was asked to take down a potato salad recipe by the publicity agent for Cooks Illustrated. Apparently, they don’t allow their recipes to be reproduced in print without permission, even with modifications. Especially with modifications.

She posted the entire email conversation, so go and read it. It’s fairly astonishing. I found it hard to believe that this kind of behavior is sanctioned by CI. I like their recipes, the magazine and the books, so I want to think the best of the company. Perhaps the publicity agent is acting as a rogue.

But still, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. So to speak.

The skinny is, in case you were wondering, that you can’t copyright recipes, which are basically a list of ingredients and directions for combining them. No recipe is really original, after all; even CI admits that. You can copyright the specific literary expression used in writing a recipe, but if you rewrite the recipe and modify the ingredients, then it becomes yours.

And asking cooks not to modify a recipe? That’s just bizarre. Isn’t that what the writers at CI do? Melissa cites the example of the no-knead bread recipe that was first published in the New York Times. I believe a modified version of this was published in a recent issue of CI. So I guess what they’re saying is that once they “perfect” a recipe, then no one should modify it because it’s, well, perfect.

I hate to tell them this, but I have cooked a lot of CI recipes, and while many of them are quite good, some of them were spectacularly imperfect.

Good for Melissa, she reposted the recipe. It is a basic potato salad recipe similar to what I would make, although I don’t use sour cream. The point is, nobody can copyright potato salad!

UPDATE: It’s a day after I wrote this post, and I’m still steamed. Unless Cooks Illustrated redeems itself soon, I’ll probably be calling myself a former subscriber.

Best Drop Buttermilk Biscuits

I am a sucker for a biscuit recipe. I’ll try them all out, even though I’ve worked out a consistently successful master recipe for quick biscuits and discovered the best buttermilk biscuit recipe, courtesy of Cook’s Illustrated. Now, Cook’s Illustrated has passed on the recipe for best drop buttermilk biscuits in the November issue, and of course, I had to try them.

The main difference between the drop biscuits and the just plain best buttermilk biscuits is that the drop biscuits are significantly easier to make. There is no messing about with the food processor or trying to shape the dough into balls. This recipe relies on mixing melted and cooled butter with the buttermilk, so that the butter forms into clumps, producing the same effect as pulsing or cutting cold butter into a regular biscuit dough. The resulting dough can then be dropped onto the baking pan, rather than shaped or cut, shaving some time off what was already a fairly quick recipe. Just beware of making your “drops” too big, as I did, or you’ll wind up with fewer biscuits that require longer baking time, although they will still be good.

The other big difference is that this is the only biscuit recipe I have tried that requires 1 full stick of butter (plus 2 tablespoons for brushing on top). My other recipes only call for 4 tablespoons. With that much butter, of course they are going to be good! They are just not going to be that good for you. You’ve been warned: Even though these biscuits are easier to make, they should probably be consumed in moderation.

Here’s the verdict: They are delicious. Big, flaky, moist — these are everything biscuits should be. My husband declared them “the best biscuits he’s ever had at home.” Enjoy.

Best Buttermilk Drop Biscuits

Yields: 12 biscuits, if you’re careful about apportioning out the dough
Time to make: ~25 minutes

You need:

• 2 cups flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• ½ tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. sugar
• ¾ tsp. salt
• 1 stick + 2 tbsp. butter
• 1 cup buttermilk
• parchment paper

1. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees.
2. Melt the 1 stick butter and let cool about 5 minutes.
3. Whisk together the dry ingredients.
4. In a separate bowl, combine the melted butter and the buttermilk, and stir until clumps form.
5. Stir the liquid into the dry ingredients until just incorporated and the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl.
6. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
7. Using a ¼ cup dry measure, scoop out and drop 12 balls of dough onto the baking sheet (this is easier if you spray the measuring cup with nonstick cooking spray).
8. Bake until the tops are golden brown, about 14 minutes.
9. Let cool on a wire rack.
10. Meanwhile, melt the remaining 2 tbsp. butter and brush the tops of the biscuits with the butter before serving.

Notes: This recipe is from the November-December 2007 issue of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine.

Garden Destruction and Pesto Making

It hurt, but we tore out the garden this weekend. It has been a strange growing season. Up until Tuesday of this week, we were still experiencing temperatures in the 90s and humidity that felt more like July. Despite being in “exceptional” drought for the last two months, the tomatoes must have thought we were having a second summer, because they all put out new flowers, and we even had tiny green tomatoes on some plants, too small to save.

Then, the temperature plummeted overnight 20 degrees to more fall-like weather, and nighttime lows fell into the 30s. We knew the baby tomatoes wouldn’t survive, but it was still painful to pull up all those plants in flower and toss them into the compost pile.

Still, I did manage to harvest quite a lot of basil from my three plants, despite letting them all go to flower for the past six weeks since it was so brutally hot that nothing would get me working outside. I made two batches of pesto: one regular-style for freezing, and one batch of arugula-basil pesto with ricotta and walnuts for eating this week (see recipe below).

Reading through my Cook’s Illustrated Italian Classics‘ section on pestos, I discovered two new tips for making pesto. The first recommendation was that before processing the pesto, put the basil or other herbs in a plastic bag and pound them with a rolling pin. This has the effect of bruising the leaves, producing a more authentic taste, a la Italian ladies pounding pesto with their mortar and pestles.

I decided not to adopt this technique, though, mainly because it seemed like too much trouble, and I wasn’t sure the gain in flavor would be worth it. If anyone else has tried it, I’d love to know what your results were. I just settled for treating the basil extra roughly when I pulled it off the stems and washed it.

The second recommendation was to toast the garlic cloves whole and unpeeled until spotty brown before processing with the rest of the ingredients. This, on the other hand, seemed like a great idea, and it was easy enough to toast the garlic in the same pan as I toasted the nuts. Since toasted garlic isn’t as strong as raw, I was able to use more, always a good thing, in my book.

Arugula-Basil Pesto with Ricotta and Walnuts

Process together until smooth in a food processor:

• 1 cup basil leaves
• 1 cup arugula leaves
• ¼ cup walnuts, toasted
• 3 whole garlic cloves, toasted until spotty brown and peeled
• 1/3 cup ricotta
• ¼ cup Parmesan
• 7 tbsp. olive oil
• salt to taste

Toss with hot, cooked pasta and serve.

Notes: Adapted from a recipe in Cook’s Illustrated’s Italian Classics. Pesto can be stored under a film of olive oil or with plastic wrap pressed against the surface in the refrigerator up to 3 days.