Cooking Up a Storm

I was downloading some photos and realized I hadn't shared some of the dishes I'd made this winter, so here goes.
Cranberry, Honey, and Ginger Biscotti
I made this biscotti for the Partners in Giving (our workplace charitable giving campaign) silent auction and bake sale. Mine contained crystallized ginger, cranberries, and honey, but there are tons of variations on this thrice-baked Italian cookie. 

Aren't they pretty?

When it comes to food, I generally like to keep it simple. (It makes up for other aspects of life that are overly complicated. :)) I will probably never concoct an elaborate old-school French meal, and baking is generally too precise and fussy for me. In that spirit, I use a fusion of basic biscotti recipes and alter it according to my whim:

2 c. flour (For baking, I usually use whole wheat pastry flour instead of bleached white flour. It's not as heavy and drying as regular whole wheat flour, but adds more nutrition than the white.)
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 c. sugar
2-3 eggs (It calls for 2 eggs and 1 egg white, but unless it's absolutely necessary, I don't separate eggs. I hate having leftover egg components because they usually go bad before I can use them.)
1 c. sugar (I use brown, rather than white.)
generous swirl of honey
~ 1 c. Craisins
~ 1 c. finely chopped crystallized ginger

Preheat oven to 350. Mix dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately, and then combine together. Mix until smooth, then transfer dough to a baking sheet, and shape into 2 logs, measuring about 12 inches long and 4 inches wide. Bake 25-30 mins. Reduce the oven temperature to 325. Cut the logs into 3/4-inch slices, turn the slices cut side down, and bake for 10 mins. Flip the slices and bake for 10 more mins. The result should be a gloriously crispy, somewhat sweet treat perfect for dunking into your cappuccino.

Spinach, Mushroom, and Feta Pizza with Phyllo Crust
I made this to use up the large box of phyllo dough in my freezer, although some of it still resides in the frozen depths. (It's from the half-successful Nigella's chicken pot pie experiment.) As is generally the case if you have a crust consisting of flaky phyllo lathered with butter, it was decadently yummy. The phyllo was a little destroyed from being defrosted and refrozen too many times, so I layered strips of it in alternating directions, brushing each layer with melted butter, until I had a thick crust. Then I topped it with sliced cremini mushrooms and spinach. I used a recipe from Epicurious.

Spaghetti Carbonara
Jason took the culinary helm on this effort, and I was the kitchen helper. I'd never had this before, but I was blown away by its fantastic flavor. I think this recipe from Amateur Gourmet was the one we used.

Spaghetti carbonara

Sweet Potato Soup with Garlic Chicken Sausage
Here, leftover curried sweet potatoes that I wasn't terribly impressed with in the beginning were transformed into a lovely soup. A spin with the stick blender and the addition of some garlic chicken sausage from Trader Joe's made all the difference.

Sweet potato soup with garlic chicken sausage and a dollop of yogurt

Red Lentil Dal
I've made this dal, originally from Cooking Light, several times now, and it's always satisfying.

The last of the red lentil dal

Ribollita

Ribollita

Ribollita, meaning "reboiled," is a hearty Tuscan stew made with white beans, tomatoes, greens, other veggies, and stale bread (to thicken the soup). The recipe from 101 Cookbooks calls for cavolo nero, which is sometimes labeled lacinato kale, Tuscan kale, or dinosaur kale. Whatever you call it, it's a particular favorite of mine. It has deeply green, curly, striking leaves, and its flavor is more robust than the regular kale favored in southern cooking. Despite that, I used mustard greens because I wanted to use them up. The black olives may seem like an odd touch, but try it. I promise you'll be pleasantly surprised. The salty, briny olives work really well against the buttery cannellini and creaminess of the bread. And sometimes, I feel like the greens overpower the dish, but not so in this case.

While the ribollita cooked, I indulged in smoked gouda on Triscuits
with black olives...and a glass of red wine.

Oops!

My apologies for my moment of idiocy in the last blog entry. I have Walt Whitman instead of T.S. Eliot saying April is the cruelest month. For some reason, I had it in my brain that that line was from Leaves of Grass, but it's actually from The Waste Land. Man, Erica. Brush up on your poetry before you start spewing in your blog. I am a boob.

Mineral Point

Walt Whitman was wrong: April is not the cruelest month. January is, or it certainly feels like it is. And February's not much better. To escape the winter doldrums, Jason and I spent a few days at the Brewery Creek Inn in Mineral Point the weekend of January 14-16. The inn is a lovely three-story limestone structure built in 1854 as a warehouse. While a warehouse doesn't sound very distinctive, it was a point of civic pride because it represented early statehood prosperity. Over the years, it was used as a cold storage facility, an insulation factory, and a local veterinarian's stable. By the 1970s, the building was in disrepair: The roof and third-floor timbers had rotted away, the beams had collapsed, and the north wall had begun to crumble. When the owners undertook renovations in July 1997, the building lacked heating, plumbing, wiring, interior walls or stairways, doors, and windows. And it had a dirt floor. Yet, they opened in June of the next year, which, to my non-construction-oriented mind, is a feat of great proportions.

The innkeeper forewarned us that our room (#7) was the smallest, but it was perfectly comfortable. The bathroom--with its ceramic tiles, wainscoting, and heavenly whirlpool--was probably my favorite part of the whole place. I was less keen on the breakfast, which was billed as "continental plus." I'm not sure where the "plus" part came in. To me, it was straight-up continental: boxed cereals, store-bought sourdough for toast with butter or jam, yogurt, juice, coffee, hard-boiled eggs, and syrupy-sweet store-bought pastries.

This is supposed to be me faking falling into the mine shaft, but it doesn't really look like that.

After slogging through Madison's Friday evening traffic (made worse by the snowy conditions), we finally made it out of the city. At the inn, we settled in and then ate dinner at the inn's restaurant. I had a gigantor slab of salmon with ginger sauce and sesame seeds. It was pretty good, and it definitely surpassed Jason's cod. For it, they drizzled the gingery sauce over the batterfried fish, leaving a hunk of bland cod in a soggy shell. We also sampled the beer, which is brewed on site. I liked the porter, but the IPA was disappointing for Jason. The description misled in that it said the hops and malt were balanced. Alas, the malt was overbearing, whereas the hops barely made an appearance. (Personally, I liked the IPA, but that's because I despise hoppy beer.) Afterward, we walked around the hilly town.

On Saturday, we hiked around the old Merry Christmas Mine Hill. In the 1830s, copper and tin miners from Cornwall, England fled poverty and hunger to emigrate to Mineral Point, which was experiencing a lead boom. The boom lasted from 1827 to 1849--when California's Gold Rush lured many of the miners away. In the second half of the 19th century, zinc mining predominated.

View of Mineral Point from the mining hill

After hiking, we took refuge from the cold in a local bar. For lunch, I had chicken fingers with barbecue sauce (exotic, I know) and Jason tried the local specialty, the pasty. The Cornish traditional version is a baked half-moon pastry filled with beef, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas or turnips. I tried a bite and found it rather bland and heavy, but I guess they were meant to fill up miners who'd been doing backbreaking labor all day.

According to legend, pasties were originally made for Cornish tin miners who were unable to come to the surface for lunch. To eat it, they would grip the crimped edge to not soil the rest with the dirt (laced with the arsenic often found with tin) that completely covered their bodies. The dirty remainder was then offered to placate the knockers, or spirits thought to inhabit the mine and endanger miners.

Close-up of pasty contents

After lunch, we grabbed coffee at a local bookstore and then headed back to the inn for a nap. That evening, we went to see Feed the Fish at the Mineral Point Opera House. Feed the Fish is a sweet indie film about a children's book writer who tries to overcome his writer's block by accompanying his friend on a trip to northern Wisconsin. Tony Shalhoub, of Monk and Big Night fame--and who's also a Green Bay native--plays the curmudgeonly local sheriff, and Barry Corbin (Maurice on Northern Exposure) plays his sage father. Katie Aselton and Ross Partridge play the romantic leads.

It was at last year's Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison and has been touring the state. I couldn't get tickets then because it was very popular, so I was excited to finally see it. (Note: Netflix won't purchase it until a certain number of people add it to their queues, so take a moment to add it.) Plus, it was a treat to see a film  set and filmed in Wisconsin, and one of the producers answered questions afterward.

The next day, we headed home and extended our relaxing weekend by having brunch at La Brioche and seeing the Coen Brothers' True Grit. I was pleasantly surprised, especially by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld's performance.