Crispy Chicken Thighs + Scallion Potato Cakes + Brussels Spouts - April 18

We're back and we're getting serious again.  We took the night off two weekends ago for Easter (okay that's a lie...we took the night off for the opening night of the MLB season) and last weekend we only made a side dish.

But this week, we're back and we mean business! What's the business we're dealing in?

Crispy Braised Chicken Thighs with olives, lemon, and fennel (p 30)
Scallion Potato Cakes (p 230)
Brussels Sprouts with Brown Butter and Sage (here)

We also brought in some muscle in the form of the cookbook-gifter herself, Annie! There were three of us in the kitchen and three dishes.  We'd split up and each take on a dish and meet at the end of the road with our dinner plates and appetites on the ready.

Hunter took on the Scallion Potato Cakes and christened our new mandolin slicer. The potatoes were peeled, jullienned, and fried into their ultimate glory.

No, I'm not exaggerating.  Tell me what the best way to prepare potatoes is.  That's right...fried in crispy, delicious cakes.

Annie took on the brussels sprouts.  Why didn't we use the brussels sprouts recipe in the Ad Hoc book?  Well, we couldn't find Kohlrabi (apparently it's akin to cabbage) so we tried out a different recipe we recently stumbled across.

This was our last hurrah with the brussels sprouts before they go out of season. They started out a brilliant green and became even more vibrant after a quick blanche and swim in an ice bath.

The brown butter sauce was simple and extremely tasty. The recipe yielded twice as much sauce as we needed. I saved the sauce and will be enjoying it with pasta later this week.

The sage was fried up and added atop as the finishing touch.

I took on the chicken thighs, which were unfortunately devoid of their skins. Even so, they browned nicely in the pan.

Next step was to create the braising sauce with a base of garlic, onions, and fennel. Once they were nicely softened, we added some white wine, chicken broth, lemon peels, and green olives. The colors looked great together!

The chicken thighs went back into the fragrant sauce and the dish went into the oven for a nice braise and came out looking and smelling delicious.

Our final presentation:

To finish our meal, we treated ourselves to mini cupcakes from Kumquat Cupcakery, a fantastic vendor at the Brooklyn Flea.

All in all, this was a glorious return back to our Ad Hoc Sundays. drool...

Yuck or Yum:
Crispy Braised Chicken Thighs with olives, lemon, and fennel (p 30): d-"A solid recipe that will definitely be repeated. The chicken was so tender and flavorful...and tasted even better the next day as leftovers." h-"Really tasty, especially the sauce, but I bet I would have loved it more with the skin. Eating chicken thighs with bones was a new experience." a-"Delicious! The chicken was perfectly cooked and flavorful."
Scallion Potato Cakes (p 230): d-"so glad we were able to finally use my new mandolin slicer! a good side, though we probably should have drained them on paper towels after taking them out of the pan."h- "A little oily and I preferred the thicker cakes better. The mandolin slicer really made them the perfect consistency." a-"Nice and crispy, perfect with the chicken."
Brussels Sprouts with Brown Butter and Sage: d-"I love me some brussels sprouts, but I could have done without the fried sage leaves and the butter sauce, though delicious, masked the true delicious flavor of the brussels sprouts." h-"The sauce made these awesome. Perfectly paired with the chicken." a-"Lots of extra sauce, which wasn't a bad thing, because it was so good. I didn't think the fried sage added much, so if I made again I would probably skip it."

Summer Vegetable Gratin- April 11

This past Sunday, Hunter and I were invited over to Anne Marie's new, beautiful, "i'm-ridiculously-jealous-of-how-much-sunlight-and-space-you-have-in-nyc" apartment. We were having a pot luck dinner to celebrate her birthday.

Hunter and I signed up to bring a side dish and prepared a bright, colorful dish to match the bright, colorful personality of our dinner party: Summer Vegetable Gratin (p. 202)

Now, we were a little nervous about preparing and blogging about this dish because:
1- Thomas Keller accompanies this recipe in the book with a brilliant, glossy two-page photo spread of this dish broken down (talk about some pressure to make our dish look good)
2- Our friends, Phil & Marie (who decided to purchase this cookbook after hearing me rave about it for weeks) cooked up this dish successfully the week before (that would be embarrassing if after all my talk about blogging through this cookbook this ended in the same demise as our aioli attempt).
3- We were going to be sharing this with our friends and frankly, were going to be cutting it close on time.  There was no room for error on this one.

Luckily, our dish turned out beautifully.

I've never found it difficult to get lots of veggies into my diet, but with Hunter it's the other way around.  He was a little skeptical whether he'd really enjoy a dish made with so many veggies, included tomatoes (definitely not high up on his list), and had so little cheese.

We hand-sliced all of the veggies: roma tomatoes, butternut squash, zucchini, and japanese eggplant.  I was excited about using my brand-new mandolin slicer only to realize with utmost disappointment that its settings sliced veggies that were too thin for this dish.  At least I got to work on my knife skills.

Hunter carefully layered the veggies in our baking dish and topped each layer with parmesan cheese and fresh breadcrumbs we made from a loaf of duckfat-garlic-bread (yes...duckfat).

...we threw it in the oven, et voila! DELICIOUS summer vegetable gratin!

Over at Anne Marie's, we popped open some bubbly, sat down at her new dining table, and enjoyed our dish with Anne Marie's flavor-packed sausage and peppers and asparagus.  yum.

 

Yuck or Yum:
Summer Vegetable Gratin (p 202): d- "really incredible. definitely a dish I'd make when entertaining company. I'd probably include more onions and watch them more closely so they don't come as close to burning!" h-"surprised how much i liked it.  i could have done without the tomatoes. maybe we could have replaced them with another veggie."

Porterhouse Steak Night- March 28

That's right.  BEEF...it's what's for dinner!

This week, we flipped to p. 51: Porterhouse Steak

"What happened to your sides?" You may be pondering. Well, you see what happened was...we also flipped to p. 223: Puree of Garlic Potatoes

but...

March Madness was on and we came home late and decided to whip up a salad, cook up some quinoa, and get to work on the steak.

Our butcher was flat out of porterhouse steaks, so we opted for the bone-in rib eye.



The first step was to make the Herb and Shallot Butter on p. 334.

parsley	shallots
unsalted butter	finished product!

We fired up our grill pan and seared both sides with beautiful grill marks.

Then we lowered the heat and continued to cook the steak while brushing the steak with the herb butter.

et voila! Steak dinner.

Yuck or Yum
Porterhouse Steak p. 51: d- "I'm not really a steak person, but this was really incredible. Keller's instructions on how to cook a medium/med-rare steak were spot on. The steak was tender and delicious. I wonder what else I can do with that herb butter we have left over!" h- "I liked it a lot. The herb butter really made the steak extra tasty and the perfect grill marks really pushed this dish over the edge."

Delicious Chicken Potpie- March 21, 2010

wow.

seriously.  wow.

This week, we hit the jackpot and flipped to Keller's recipe for chicken potpie (p. 24).  How can you say no to all of these delicious ingredients?

sweet carrots	red new potatoes
crisp celery	pearl onions

We tried our hand at a homemade pie crust...a first for both of us.  It was surprisingly easy, especially considering all we used was a bowl, our hands (okay, Hunter was the one who really got his hands dirty), and an empty wine bottle (one of these days, I'm going to buy a rolling pin).

What made this pot pie really flavorful and different from pot pies I've enjoyed in the past is that this one was held together by a bechemel sauce, that is, a creamy sauce made from butter, flour, and milk, rather than a stock-based gravy.


The finished product came out perfectly browned with a fluffy, buttery crust and a creamy and slightly peppery, hearty filling.  It really was incredible.

To round out our meal, we flipped to p. 150 for iceberg lettuce slices with blue cheese dressing, oven-roasted tomatoes, bacon, and brioche croutons.

oven roasted tomatoes

rendered smoked bacon

The fresh, crisp, greens of the lettuce gave a nice light and refreshing contrast to the earthiness of the roasted tomatoes, smokey bacon, and crunchy homemade croutons.  The recipe for the oven roasted tomatoes instructed us to leave them in the oven for 5-6 hours, but I probably should have taken them out around 4 hours.  They were a little burnt, but still really flavorful.  Mostly tart with a bit of sweetness.

mmm....doesn't that just make your mouth water?

Yuck or Yum:
- Chicken Pot Pie (p 24): d- "sooooo yummy!  how many days of leftovers can I stretch this out to?" h- "pleasantly surprised at the creaminess of the bechemel filling.  I could have used more of the bechemel, but on the whole, it was really filling."
- Iceberg Lettuce Slices (p 150): d- "with bacon and blue cheese, you really can't go wrong!" h- "really, really good. maybe next time we'll make the blue cheese dressing from scratch and add lots of big hunks of blue cheese.  and thicker chunks of bacon!"

Down the Rabbit Hole- March 14

Welcome to week #2.

This week's menu was quite an adventure- where finding all of the sub-recipes for our finished meal felt like chasing a white rabbit down a rabbit hole.

"What was served at the mad hatter's table," you ask?

Menu: Sunday, March 14
-Sauteed Chicken Breasts with Tarragon (p 27)
-Red Potato and Green Bean Salad with creamy pepper dressing (p 228)
we selected quinoa to accompany our meal

We first started by preparing the salad. But in order to make the salad, we needed to make the creamy pepper dressing (p 183). And to make the dressing, we needed to first prepare a 1/2 cup of Aioli (p 333). And to make the Aioli, you must whip up some garlic oil (p 266). Boy was that an adventure.

Our first attempt at making the aioli was...
a disaster. It resulted in a watery yellow soup. Maybe we didn't whip up the egg yolks well enough? Perhaps the garlic oil was still warm? Or perchance we added the oil too quickly?

Whatever did happen, luckily we had some Hellman's in the fridge and cooked garlic cloves we had set aside after making the garlic oil. We mashed up the tender garlic into the Hellman's, et voila!...aioli.


We prepared the rest of the pieces of this vibrant salad: green beans, chives, and new potatoes and bibb lettuce.

























Hunter, meanwhile, drew on his Eagle Scout experience to fashion a meat tenderizer out of a bottle of rum and pounded our yellow curry + sweet paprika-marinated chicken breasts to a quarter of an inch thick.

We then pan-fried the chicken and created a sauce using butter, shallots, white wine, chicken stock, and tarragon. Boy did the kitchen smell amazing!

Final Plating-


To finish our meal, we enjoyed some delicious Cheshire Cat. Johnny Depp came over to hang out, too.

Yuck or Yum
-Sauteed Chicken Breasts with Tarragon (p 27): dominique-"it was pretty good. the sauce totally made the dish." hunter- "could have used more salt but pretty good and pretty tender."
-Red Potato and Green Bean Salad with creamy pepper dressing (p 228): d-"mmmm...absolutely worth all of the steps. that dressing is phenomenal!" h- "potatoes were a little mushy but still delicious- next time we'll make sure not to overcook them. the dressing was tangy and sweet!"

Oscar Sunday- March 7

Face it. Football season is over. There's no waking up to cheerios + Sunday NFL Countdown leading to a full day of a glorious display of manly athleticism. So to fill the void, Hunter and I decided that every week we'd randomly flip to a new page in my new Thomas Keller Cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home, and cook whatever we flipped to each Sunday. We agreed on a few ground rules: each person has one veto each week and if the dish we flipped to was grossly out of season, we'd flip again.

Why this cookbook?



I've received many cookbooks as gifts (thanks, Annie!) and bought a couple myself, but Keller's latest cookbook features simple recipes that really break each step down and, most importantly, don't have a ton of ingredients!

On the previous Sundays (before we decided to start blogging), we've made:
- herb-crusted rack of lamb (p 59)
- caramelized sea scallops (p 88)
- whole roasted chicken on a bed of root vegetables (p 22)

The sea scallops were our favorite, but the others were definitely delicious and surprisingly easy.

This Sunday, we flipped to:
- peppercorn-crusted beef tenderloin (p 47)
- sauteed broccoli rabe (p 195)
and then Hunter was craving sweet potatoes, so we added:
- glazed sweet potatoes (p 232)

Wow. The beef tenderloin was peppery and incredibly tender. Keller's instructions were spot on and directed us to a perfect medium rare cut. We didn't have a roasting pan & rack, so we improvised with a pan with high sides and a cooling rack that fit snugly inside.

The broccoli rabe was vibrantly green and crisp with a hint of spiciness. I love the hint of crisp bitterness you get, especially paired with the tender steak and the sweet sweet potatoes.

And the glazed sweet potatoes? Ohhhhh man! Those were TO DIE FOR! Crispy and sweet and incredibly delicious. We'll definitely be making those again!



Final plating-


To finish up, we enjoyed mini cupcakes from Baked by Melissa. yummy.





Hunter says the best part of the meal was that we he only had to clean up 4 pans!

Yuck or Yum:
peppercorn-crusted beef tenderloin (p 47): dominique- yum! hunter- yum!
sauteed broccoli rabe (p 195): d- "meh, it's okay" h- "it's not yuck...is there a middle ground?"
glazed sweet potatoes (p 232): d- "i'm in heaven!" h-"dominant, decadent."