the red spoon

goat cheese and caramelized onion no-knead bread

meg — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:00:02 +0000

I’ve been waiting for a rainy day to tell you about this bread, and though today fits the quintessential dreary, wet spring day, I am a bit ashamed I’ve waited so long to share. I’m sure you all are familiar with the concept of no-knead bread, the kind that prefers to let bread get its crackly crust and incredible flavor from the tiniest smidge of yeast and a long, slow fermenting rise. I hail Jim Lahey as the king of this wondrous feat, I mean, us moms over here don’t have spare time to intensely knead bread for our dinner everyday. This concept is a game changer. It’s been insanely popular on the blogosphere for the last 7+ years, but today I would like to present my riff on the classic: a no-knead loaf filled with caramelized onion goodness and gooey pockets of goat cheese — I’m clearly not subtle when it comes to the things I like, cough, caramelized onions and goat cheese, cough.

Regardless of how un-hands-on no-knead bread might be, it still does take some foresight to plan out. When I mentioned above that a no-knead loaf needs a long, slow rise, I’m talking 24-hours. Lahey’s recipe calls for an 18-hour rise, so for those thinking I’m trying to kill you with an extra 6-hours, well, I’ve got your back. 18-hours is an odd length to time-out. When to start making the bread, and then letting it slowly rise, making sure you factor in enough time for the quick second 15-minute rise as well as bake time so that everything can be prepared and ready to eat when your husband steps through the front door ready to get his chow on. (Just to be realistic here, men should give you extra brownie points your house now smells like an angelic bread revival when he steps inside regardless of how “on time” or not your bread might be. But I digress.) 18-hours, whether you work out of the home or in the home can be challenging to time perfectly so I stretched it out, after all, isn’t the long rise where this bread grabs hold of its shekinah glory?

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romaine salad with whiskey onions, corn bread, and buttermilk dressing

meg — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:26:51 +0000

After such a decadent pie I’ve decided to self inflict an extreme detox — a word I refused to let into my vocabulary, every-day thinking, and entire life. Detoxes are for those who eat in excess, who are health nuts, for people who feel bad about the tiniest pin point of margarine (eww, yuck!) on their 52 multi-grain, vitamin packed, more nutritious than a raw kale, beets and spinach combination, inch of ~~cardboard~~ toast each morning. I’m just not one of those. I’ve been known to eat an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s for dinner and then go for dessert (ahem, churro chex mix, how could I not?).

I’m one who violently opposes running, who flees from the slightest hint of a juice cleanse, and shuns (by ripping into a thousand shreds) the $5 gym membership flyers that daily plague my mailbox. I refuse to be guilted into any kind of regimen (ice cream of course, the obvious exception). But pie and ice cream and churros have begun their eternal devastation to this body, and right before bathing suit season too. How rude. (If you are the super breed kind of woman who was born a permanent size 2 for your entire life no matter what you intake, I loathe you. Also, if there is such a thing as a metabolism transplant please sign up. Gaining weight is awesome! hehe)

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banana cream pie

meg — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:33:00 +0000

Alright, I’ve run out of reasons to procrastinate, so let’s get to it. Let’s talk pie. Like, extraordinary, intense, jaw-dropping, labor of love pie. That, is what this is. It is no joke, no make-me-on-a-whim-because-you-suddenly-got-a-hankerin-for-a-really-good-wedge-of-fluffy-banana-cream-pie. This baby takes time and patience; it’s definitely a celebratory pie if there ever was one and demands you to scream out after landing it gracefully on top of your highest pedestal for all to see, NAILED IT! Because you actually will. I have complete faith in you.

Unlike the more “traditional” banana cream — the one that involves pudding and wafer cookies, a banana and a pile of cool whip — this pie has five major components that each makes you invest your valuable nap time minutes (read: you will be making your own peanut butter, pastry cream and bourbon caramel, you can do it!). On an everyday basis I would be telling you streamline!, reduce it to one bowl!, substitute with things you already have stocked in your pantry! (peanut butter, I’m talking to you) but in this case, in this rare worth-it-to-spend-a-few-days-slaving moment, I want to tell you to forget it all just this once and do it the long way.

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mother-in-law’s pineapple stuffing

meg — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 03:18:06 +0000

The first family Easter dinner I brought my husband to we dined on lamb. I guess you could call it tradition, we eat it every Easter, though I never gave it much thought until my newly made husband balked on the ride to my parents house over the sacrilege of eating lamb on the very day celebrating the resurrection of…the Lamb of God. At nineteen I just shrugged. It didn’t bother me a bit, or even occur to me to make the connection. To me, it was the only time each year I got to feast on a lamb dinner and I was not about to have my husband and his teasing accusations interfere.

Besides, the joke was on him. No sooner did he get over his mockery of my family’s blasphemy and shimmy a piece of roasted meat on his plate than he got wide eyed and slightly judgmental that we ate our sacrificial blasphemous heretical lamb with green jello. Green jello! We still chuckle and shake our heads whenever we think about his barbaric sheep meat ignorance — not knowing that lamb is eaten with mint jelly.

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chicken and dumplings

meg — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:08:56 +0000

This is one of those dishes that gets me super excited and begs me to tell you: make this now! Do not wait for this horrid rain to stop, do not wait for the end of your work day, do not wait for your vegetarian conscious to pipe up and remind you, you don’t eat meat. But I fear if I display this much fervor over a chicken dinner you will take my word less seriously, especially the next time another extraordinary recipe comes across these pages. So suffice it to say this frighteningly excellent recipe is what every chicken dish could be, or more correctly should be and is the perfect alternative to a disappointing spring market still lacking everything but the last withering remnants of winter’s offerings: root vegetables.

But if you will humor me for a moment and let me be far more dramatic than I am in everyday life, I would like to take this time to talk about how this, this southern deconstructed pot-pie like dish, can change your entire perspective on chicken. You see, this month I realized I only had nine recipes archived under poultry. Nine! And I don’t think I could pass off the impersonation of being vegetarian (ha ha ho ho, yeah right) even when there is an overwhelming dominance of vegetarian options (fifty-four!) categorized for you non-meat lovers. Now most of you following us into our fourth year here at the red spoon will know that I’ve griped and complained over chicken exactly nine times. Each time my opinion shifts as I recognize not all chicken has to be boring or mundane. Each time it gets better. Far better. But I think chicken and dumplings has irrevocably changed my views on chicken being dinner more than nine times in four years. In fact, it could be a weekly routine.

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tomato orange soup + grilled cheese croutons

meg — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:57:21 +0000

I’m over here, day five in this horrible business of being sick. I don’t think anyone quite prepared me fully on how awful a thing it is to be quarantined away from your loved ones — especially the freshly trimmed blondie you spent almost a week away from — or the even more pitiful qualm of needing to be quarantined but cannot be because, well, you’re mom and how else is the laundry going to be folded, runny noses wiped or your little house going to continue chugging along in a somewhat peaceful manner.

Thankfully we’re slowly on the mend and hopefully I won’t be down for much longer. But while I am here, lazily in bed trying to ration out my last few aloe-veraed ultra soft puffs and sip my quickly depleting mug of hot tea I thought I would take a moment to tell you about some really great soup. I think tomato soup is something everyone should have in their arsenal of go-to recipes, which is odd because only recently, err when I made it from scratch, did I ever begin to question the sincerity of my former favorite: condensed tomato soup. Yes, I was a lover of the canned tomato soup — the kind that required two things: water and a bowl. It’s what I grew up on, it’s what I was familiar with and when nostalgia and the only frame of reference to base tomato soup upon is what you like and prefer, well, there’s a phrase: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. To me, it was unbroken. It was what I liked. And though my husband violently opposed such beloved affection I was set out to make him love it.

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chorizo and white bean cassoulet

meg — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 20:05:32 +0000

I could dive right into discussing this cassoulet or we could spend a few minutes catching up on New York City. Right, that’s what I thought. I will start with a quick gush: the city from every angle is just, well, beautiful. I feel like I was fully immersed in the way of true city life. Not only was my life threatened within minutes of landing inside its gates (I took this to mean only one thing, I was being welcomed with open arms), I was also smack dab front and center in Times Square. I know, for us tourists it’s the Mecca of NYC, for you New Yorkers it’s like being dragged to your Great-Grandmother’s house to watch golf and eat horrible ham and mayonnaise sandwiches on stale, gummy white wonder (not) bread — yeah, don’t ask. Basically, The Square is the pits for you Big-Apple-blooded permanents, and you don’t go there…ever. And I get it. I wasn’t too excited myself. I’m a bit of an introvert (my husband says that’s the biggest understatement of my life, but you all wouldn’t agree, right? I can ~~talk~~ type a lot. Sometimes.) and being around crowds makes me claustrophobic. And when I say crowd, I mean three people including myself.

Usually I will just hang on my husbands arm and have him pull me through the ocean of walking blobs around me as I choke on all the people (read: like all of them) smoking, but this trip, my anniversary trip, I was all on my own. I’m not going to call out my husband here because now that it’s all over I had a fantastic time (hair cut, I’m talking about you) and well, he’s a pretty great guy so I can’t complain about anything, but this trip was actually a business trip I tagged along on because it fell on a pretty big milestone of ours. Five years, I mean, that’s a pretty big deal. So he conferenced it up during the day, while I hit the streets becoming, what I like to think of as, a true New Yorker. I mean, I had it down. I brought my walking shoes and I bobbed and weaved my way in and out of people, I ignored the stop signals in cross walks and I had my iphone ear buds in rockin’ out to my top 50 secluding myself to my own world of instagram and google maps, because heck, I had no idea how to get around. I even hailed my own cab. I’m legit now.

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red velvet cheesecake swirled brownies

meg — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:48:52 +0000

I don’t get red velvet cake. I mean, there a lot of things I spend my time lazily wondering about — why babies insist on hunting and eating the dirt off your carefully swept (I guess not) carpet, why I have not been able to persuade my husband to get me a kitchen maid (err, dirty dishes maid) Downton Abbey style, why people eat lima beans, who was the unlucky person(s) who found out the hard way (umm, death) that certain foods are poisonous, why men loathe using hampers, or why I should splurge to get our little guy this — and every once in a while my mind gets stuck on red velvet, baffling me to no end.

It’s teetering on the edge of being chocolate yet has such little cocoa it’s as if it is clinging to its vanilla roots with every ounce of flour only to be dyed the most vibrant shade of red. I’m getting the impression whoever came up with red velvet was a very fickle person. No, but seriously, what is the point of red velvet? I just don’t understand. If it is not loved for its strong, decided flavor camp, which it has none, is it the velvety, soft texture? Surely we all know, this is not the only or best cake with such a wonderful plush interior. If that’s not it, perhaps its loyal following is due simply to its color, something you definitely will not hear me complain about — but does that really have anything to do with the cake at all? Why not just dye a really good chocolate cake red, or your favorite orange cake (blood orange anyone?) red.

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creamy chocolate pudding

meg — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 06:36:28 +0000

After admitting last week I am quite unromantic, and well, feeling somewhat bad my better half always exceeds me in anything thoughtful or romantic, I decided to attempt an intervention on myself. We’re headed to the Big Apple next week for four whole days and three long, wonderful, uninterrupted nights and I wanted to pack up something especially thoughtful (in the way of the belly) for the journey. Unfortunately, I do not think any amount of bribes or sharing would persuade airport security to give us a break enabling us a non-packaged snack mid-flight. Thinking on my feet, like I do, and being in love with anyone willing and ready to make a celebration longer than it was intended to be (i.e. birthday celebrations spread out at least a week in each direction instead of crammed in one long weekend) I made our anniversary, ahem our fifth anniversary, begin a whole week early.

I’m starting with chocolate pudding — a little obsession of my husbands. He’s a big lover of the snack packs and in my somewhat pretentious disdain for the one-noted goop filled cartons I let him grab them without the faintest thought of making it for him myself. I’m not a big chocolate lover to begin with (surely I must be damaged) and pudding, frankly, is just not that wow-ing to make me change my mind on chocolate or the fact that pudding is boring. It reminds me of school lunches and a childhood bereft of excellent chocolate goods, my own damaged fault I’m sure. But here I am, trying to be a thoughtful un-standard-male-like girl and wife and it struck me that I could make him something so much greater and deeper and intense than the instant packages we very rarely bring home.

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meatball sliders

meg — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:19:07 +0000

If you ask a woman the first thing that comes to mind when saying the word February she will probably say something like: love, roses, valentine, candle light, romance or all of the above (please, what woman only says one word). But for men the typical response this year is: super bowl. I mean, there might be a few exceptions to the typical couple, like, for example, us. I usually give the one word answers and my husband’s romantic side always out weighs any pig skin or athletic related anything. He’s the kind who starts planning our up coming fifth anniversary in November (me: planning starts the day before) and has a road map laid out with every pit stop to be made on the get away he has booked (me: what? You need to pee?)

So this year I took a cue from my husband and stopped being so, err male, and decided to treat him to a Super Bowl party, that, umm, is not being hosted by yours truly. I guess what I mean to say is, I will send him off to a party with a humble offering of man food (read: meatball subs scaled to single servings (read: meat (read: manly chest pound and war cry))) while I stay home and wait out the Idon’tknowhowlongafootballgameis time by doing something more my speed: making a snack for our get away travels. Or organizing my closet while imagining it contains walk-in space. Or picking up the 391 toys strewn across the house. Or, just maybe, I will sneak over to the game and steal a few ~~snacks~~ sliders. That’s how I roll.

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