FoodFunk.ca

Leek?  Why leek?  Why not chunder root or inbred onion cousin?  Okay, fine, rapeseed or ugli fruit are worse names, but still.

On to the soup.

Leeks are of course the sweet and sultry cousin of the onion, mild but with a distinct earthy-sweet flavour that makes them great as an accent for all kinds of things or you can sing their praises in a soup like this one.   Filled out with potato and cream, this soup is hearty enough to serve as supper but a small portion would also serve as a great starter.  If you’ve got some chicken stock ready in the freezer, this soup whips together quickly too, making for great elegance on a weeknight after work.  Serve it up with some dainty bread sticks if that’s what floats yer boat.

Cream of leek and potato soup

2 tablespoons butter

2 large leeks, cleaned and chopped

1 small stalk of celery, fine chopped

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

1 russet potato (or other potato that mashes well), peeled and chopped into cubes

3 cups chicken stock (preferably homemade)

1 cup 18-per-cent cream (coffee cream)

pinch of fresh chopped thyme leaves (or dried)

salt and plenty of fresh cracked black pepper

First, chop the root end off the leek, then chop the greens off, leaving only about an inch of green at the top of the white.   Split the leek lengthwise and fan out the layers.  Run them under running cold water to wash out any dirst.  Chop the leeks fine.  Heat a soup pot over medium heat for a few minutes and add the butter.  Add the leeks and celery and saute gently for seven minutes or so, until the leeks are very soft.  Add the garlic and saute another minute.  Add the potato chunks, then the chicken stock.  Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce to medium low.  Simmer uncovered for 15 minutes until the potato is very soft.  Transfer the mixture to a food processor or blender and blend until very smooth.  Transfer back to the pot and add the cream, thyme, salt and pepper.  Simmer very gently on low heat for five minutes to infuse the thyme flavour and serve.

At least once every couple of weeks, it’s time for a good old pizza. Sometimes I feel like loading it an inch thick with sausage, pepperoni, genoa salami and other meats. Sometimes I like a bunch of red peppers, olives, sweet onion and fresh tomato. Sometimes I like just a classic, thin margherita, which is just really good tomato sauce with good mozzarella and some torn basil leaves. There’s obviously a pizza for every mood. There’s an underlying theme with all them though: A good, homemade crust. The only special equipment I’d recommend is a pizza stone (about $12 to $20 and available at most grocery stores). Here’s a recipe for a basic, homemade, margherita pizza.

Pizza dough

2 cups all purpose flour (or use half Italian “00″ flour and half all purpose)
3/4 cup warm water
1 tablespoon dry active yeast (I like “Traditional”)
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons olive oil

Put the water in a microwaveable container and microwave for about 45 seconds on high. You’re looking to get the water to about the temperature of a warm bath, or 120 F. Stir in the sugar and add the yeast. Let stand for 10 minutes to proof. The water should be opaque brown with a nice head of foam on it now. Add a cup of flour to a bowl and add the water-yeast mixture and the olive oil. Add the salt as well. Stir it all well with a spoon and add more flour, a quarter cup at a time, until you have a mass you can pull from the bowl to a work surface. Flour the board and begin kneading the dough, folding it, punching down and folding, for about five minutes until you have a smooth dough. Add more flour as necessary if it gets sticky on your hands or the board. Once done kneading, form it into a ball and drop it in a glass bowl. Add more olive oil and turn the dough to coat. Let stand for at least one hour or up to two hours (you can make sauce and grate cheese and other toppings while it’s rising. Have everything ready when the dough is ready). Now here’s where technique matters. Don’t use a rolling pin. Just remove your risen dough to a well floured board and punch it down a bit. Use your fingers to start spreading the dough out to a round pizza shape. Feel free to pick it up, place it over your two fists and do some stretching that way as well. Try to get it nice and even and into the size of pizza you want. Place on a floured pizza paddle (or similar flat surface that you’ll be able to slide it off of and into the oven). Top with your tomato sauce and other toppings. Preheat the oven to 500 F with a pizza stone in it. Slide your pizza in and cook for six to eight minutes, or until the cheese on top is just starting to brown in spots. Remove, let cool and slice it up.

Easy (but awesome) tomato sauce

28 oz can whole tomatoes
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
pinch of salt and pepper
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
pinch of dried oregano

Open the can of tomatoes. With your fingers, remove each tomato and bust it up with your fingers into a bowl. Add the garlic, salt, pepper, olive oil and oregano. Mix it up and that’s that! Spread on your fresh pizza dough and top with a good amount of mozzarella. Surprisingly great!!

Smoked (and ridiculously awesome) tomato sauce

1 cup hickory wood chips for the barbecue
7-10 very ripe plum tomatoes
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
pinch of salt and pepper
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
pinch of dried oregano

Soak the hickory chips in water for at least an hour. Drain the chips and wrap in aluminum foil. Punch holes in the foil. Start your barbecue (preferably charcoal but propane will work in this case, grudgingly). Place the foil pack directly on the coals and drop the top. Wait for smoke to start appearing. Place the tomatoes on an aluminum foil plate, or a double-thick layer of aluminum foil and put that on the cool side of the barbecue. Place the cover on the BBQ and let the tomatoes smoke gently for about 30 minutes. The idea is to smoke them lightly, not cook them, so lift the top to release excessive heat on occasion during the 30 minutes. Remove the tomatoes and place in a sauce pot. Use a knife or fork to just bust them up a bit and release their liquid.  Season with salt and pepper.   Bring to a boil over medium high heat then reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.   Pass them through a food mill (this removes the seeds and skins. Pureeing in a blender or food processor is a passible option) into a bowl. Add the garlic, the extra virgin olive oil and oregano and stir well.  Taste it and season as necessary, then leave to cool.   Isn’t that the best bloody thing in the history of food? Just wait’ll it gets on your pizza.

Margherita pizza

Make your dough. Spread either the easy tomato sauce or the smoked tomato sauce on top (not too much!). Top with good mozzarella (look for a ball of “stretched” mozzarella. It makes a big difference). Sprinkle with torn fresh basil leaves. Cook the pizza for 6 to 8 minutes on the pre-heated stone at 500 F. Remove and give it a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. Let cool for five minutes and serve. Best pizza ever.

- First published May, 2007 and freshly stolen from my Facebook page.

If you’re ever looking for a dish to impress that special someone, look no further than the classic Italian dumpling, gnocchi.   While it might seem like a risky kind of thing to attempt for a date meal if you haven’t done it before, it’s actually a good one because you can make the dumplings way ahead of time.  If you nail a batch the first time out, great, but if you screw it up, there’s still plenty of time to start over.  Once you’ve got it nailed, then it’s just a matter of boiling at the last minute and tossing in a simple sauce, anything from alfredo to tomato to herb to just garlic, oil and parmesan.  Serve alongside a salad and dinner is nailed.   There’s lots of “nailing” in this paragraph, I know.  Try out some gnocchi to see why.

Pretty much the only special equipment you’ll need is a potato ricer.  This makes quick, consistant work of mashing the potato with no lumps and without making them gloopy (never puree them!).  Pretty much any sauce that works with pasta works great with gnocchi.  Try my tomato sauce from this site, or a simple cream sauce (below).

Gnocchi

3 russet potatoes (about a pound or so)

1 teaspoon salt

1 egg yolk

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

Preheat your oven to 400 F.  Poke a few holes in each potato and bake them uncovered on a baking sheet for one hour.   This is essentially to both cook and dry out the potatoes a little bit.  The dryer the potato, the less flour you’ll have to use in the gnocchi dough.  Your goal is to have a dough that tastes more like potato than flour.  Let the potatoes cool for 10 minutes after they come out of the oven (you can cut them in half to speed up the process and release a bit more moisture).  Cut the potatoes into four pieces and pass them  through your ricer (you don’t even have to peel them – another great thing about the ricer) into a big bowl and season with salt.  Separate an egg and drop in the yolk.  Stir the mixture well.  Start by adding about a half cup of flour and mix it in.  At some point, you’re going to have to get your hands in there, so now’s a good time to do it.  Mix it well and add a bit more flour a time, mixing with each addition.  Really mash the dough together so it comes together in a ball.  Once you’ve got a cup or so of flour in there, it should be ready to move to a floured work surface.   Press and fold the dough (kneading) for several minutes until it gets smoother (this develops gluten in the flour that helps the gnocchi hold their shape, so really give it a workout), sprinkling more flour as necessary if the dough seems too wet.  Cover the dough with plastic wrap and set aside for 10 minutes.  Sprinkle a bit more flour on your work surface.  Cut the dough into three pieces and roll out into a long, thin cylinder shape, like you used to do with play-dough when you were in University.  Use a sharp knife to cut the dough into 1-inch pieces.  If someone’s watching, do this really quickly so you look cool.  Grab a fork and place it rounded-tines side up against each piece (see photo below).  Use your index finger to gently roll the piece up the tines of the fork to create a dimple on one side and ridges on the other.   That’s yer gnocchi.  Sprinkle the pieces with a bit of flour and toss them around a bit to get coated.  Remove to a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper.  Refrigerate if you’re going to let them sit more than two hours, otherwise they can just stay on the counter.  Bring a large pot of generously salted water to a rolling boil.  When your sauce (and everything else for the meal) is ready to go, add the gnocchi to the pot by sliding them in to the water away from you.  Have a slotted spoon handy.  Once they start rising to the surface of the water, begin plucking them out with the slotted spoon into a bowl that’s got a little butter or oil in it (or if doing a light pan sauce, just spoon them right into your prepared sauce and toss).  Serve the gnocchi on pre-warmed plates (important).

Cream sauce for gnocchi

2 tablespoons butter

1 clove garlic, peeled and chopped into three chunks

1 cup coffee cream (18 per cent milk fat)

Hefty pinch of fresh grated nutmeg

salt and fresh cracked white pepper

1/4 cup parmesan cheese, grated

Heat a large fry pan over medium heat for a couple of minutes.  Add the butter, then add the garlic clove pieces.  Simmer for a minute then add a half cup of the cream.   Add the nutmeg, a pinch of salt and the white pepper.  Bring to a boil then reduce heat to medium-low.  Let simmer for about six minutes to reduce and thicken. Pluck out the garlic pieces and discard.  Remove from heat and add the rest of the cream, then the parmesan cheese.  Return to heat and stir until smooth.  Add your gnocchi right to the pan and toss carefully.   Finish with a bit more cream and/or butter if it seems dry.  Serve on pre-warmed plates and top with more fresh-grated parmesan.

Rolling out the dough.

Rolling each piece against the fork.  Make sure your board is always well floured for this.

Ready for the pot.  You’ve nailed it!

Under pressure for a quicker bean.

Contrary to what you might think, I don’t really like to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.   My bread can take four hours from start to finish but my time with it is less than 15 minutes.   My all-day ribs take, you know, all friggin’ day, but my effort is just a rub at the beginning, throw ‘em on the barbecue later then chow down.  Basically my all day ribs have me working for about 20 minutes.   I’m a huge believer in letting good tools, the stove and the oven do the real work for you.

One thing I really like to make is baked beans.   I don’t make them too often though because they just take so long.   Most recipes begin with a pre-soak, typically overnight but always at least eight hours.  Then you cook the beans, typically for two hours, drain them then add flavours and bake for what seems like a couple of weeks.   It’s a long freakin’ time and ties up pots, the stove and oven way too long.

Dried beans are tough little bastards so the only way to speed up this process is going to be by the introduction of pressure.   I’ve been using a Lagostina pressure cooker for years and really love it.   It’ll turn the toughest cut of beef into a rich, tender stew faster than you can order a pizza from the local pizza joint.   So would that work for baked beans?  I set the lofty goal of going from a bag of dried beans to a pot of delicious baked beans in one hour flat.   And after a couple of failed attempts that involved scraping burnt beans off the bottom of the pot and another pot of bean soup, I finally nailed it down.   A rich, saucy pot of tender beans just waiting to be served alongside some fresh bread, some eggs at breakfast or potatoes at supper.   What used to take nearly a 24 hour period previously was now possible in the time it takes to watch back to back episodes of Seinfeld.  And even George Costanza wouldn’t notice that the beans in this recipe are never actually baked.

Dust off that pressure cooker and give it a shot!

High pressure baked beans

1 cup dried white pea beans

8 cups water

1 tablespoon kosher salt

2 strips bacon, chopped

1 onion, finely chopped

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/3 cup ketchup

1/4 cup barbecue sauce

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 tablespoons dried mustard

2 cups water for finishing

salt and pepper to taste

Dump your beans into the pressure cooker and top with eight cups of water.  Attach the lid and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and pressure cook for 25 minutes.    Meanwhile, heat a large fry pan over medium heat for a few minutes and add the bacon pieces.   Stir and fry until slightly crisped.   Add the oil then the chopped onion.  Cook gently for about 10 minutes, then add the ketchup, barbecue sauce, brown sugar, dried mustard and water.  Season lightly with salt and pepper and bring the mixture to the boil.   Once the beans have been pressure cooking for 25 minutes. Remove from heat and release the pressure valve.   Remove the lid and drain off all but about 1/2 cup of water.   Dump in the hot flavouring mixture, stir for a moment and put the lid back on, then place back on the heat.   Initially increase the heat to high to bring it to a boil and get it up to pressure again.   Once at pressure, reduce to medium and cook for 10 minutes, then reduce to medium low and cook another 10 minutes, then to low and cook for 10 minutes.   Reducing the heat along the way will help prevent anything from burning or sticking to the bottom of the pot while keeping the pressure up.   Remove the lid and season to taste again with salt and pepper if needed.  You are now a superhero like me.

The pressure cooker.  A Lagostina model that dates back to around 1997.  They made three sizes and this was the biggest one.

What a perfect time of year for some Greek food.   Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onion; all in abundance, all fabulous, all locally grown and cheap as the dirt they’re grown in.   My tomatoes in the salad below hail from my parents own garden in Smiths Cove, Nova Scotia, just outside Digby.  Simply amazing tomatoes that are vine ripened, powerfully flavoured and deeply red right to the centre core.   Red and green peppers are also available from local growers, as are a plethora of cucumbers.  In addition to a big cucumber for this salad, I also recently bought five pounds of pickling cukes. Great stuff and a good reason why this time of year is the best if you’re someone who eats food.   Here’s a simple Greek-style meal that I slapped together on a Tuesday.  Pre-brine the pork and this meal comes together in an hour flat.  The dressing for the salad is also used to baste the pork on the barbecue.

Greek oil and vinegar dressing

2 cloves garlic, finely minced

hefty pinch each of salt, pepper (like a good half teaspoon each)

Juice of one lemon

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

Stir all ingredients together.  You can just mix with a spoon or actually blend it, it doesn’t really matter.  I just mixed with a spoon and drizzled as needed.

Hawk’s Pork Souvlaki

1-1/2 pound boneless pork rib roast, cut into 1-inch cubes

3 tablespoons kosher salt

water

salt and pepper

Greek style dressing for basting

Cut the pork into large cubes and place in a bowl.  Mix the salt until dissolved with enough water to cover the pork and pour it over the pork.  Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit in the refrigerator for at least two hours.   Drain the pork and rinse it under running water for a few seconds.   Let it drain well then skewer the pork on either metal or water-soaked skewers.  Pat the pork dry (it doesn’t need to be bone-dry, just free of excess water) with paper towels and season well on both sides with salt and pepper.  Heat your barbecue (preferably charcoal) until very hot.  Grill the pork carefully until slightly charred all the way around and cooked through, applying Greek dressing liberally each time you turn the skewers.   Really try to infuse it with a good amount of dressing.  The smoke and fire that kicks up helps the flavour and cooking too, and gets rid of all that unneccesary hair on your hands and arms.  Remove the pork skewers to a clean plate and cover with foil for a few minutes before you chow down.  Serve with lots of garlic sauce.

Hawk’s garlic sauce that’s kind of like tzatziki

1 clove garlic, finely minced

2 tablespoons Greek style dressing (above)

juice of one lemon

2/3 cup plain yogurt

salt and pepper to taste

Mix everything well and refrigerate until ready to use.  That was easy, eh?

Hawk’s Greek Salad

2 medium tomatoes, seeded and cut into chunks

1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut into chunks

1 green bell pepper, seeded and cut into chunks

1 cucumber, you know the drill

1/2 red onion, very thinly sliced (or chunked if you prefer)

A good size block of feta cheese, cut into chunks

plenty of good black olives

Greek style dressing (as above)

Prepare the tomatoes and bell peppers and place in a large bowl.   For the cucumber, I first sliced the cucumber in half (it was a big cuke), then sliced it lengthwise.   Use a spoon to remove all the watery seeds, then cut the remaining cuke into chunks similar in size to the tomatoes and peppers.   Slice and add the onion, then add the feta and black olives.   I like to just dish the salad as it is onto plates and drizzle the individual serving with the dressing – that way you can save extra salad in the refrigerator without anything getting mushy.

The souvlaki:

Alexandra likes it too – especially the yogurt garlic sauce.

Notes.

- By all means, go ahead and serve up the pork souvlaki in a fresh warm pita with some garlic sauce, onion, tomato or whatever you like.

- The pork I used for the souvlaki was a boneless pork rib roast, a solid hunk of pork that’s taken from close to the ribs.  It was actually a mix of the lighter and darker meat but it was all very tender and moist.  This particular roast cost just $5.17 at Cochrane’s Market in Rothesay and could easily serve four adults so it was a great value too.

- Do not skip the brining of the pork!  Brining seasons the meat and helps it to retain moisture over the fire.   It is the difference between bland dry pork and fabulously flavoured moist pork.   In fact, always brine your pork – always!