Large pizza = $10.  2 people @ 2 slices each, $5. Take that.

Next month, we kick off themes. For August 2008, we combat the scourge of beige with colorful produce. Our theme: A seasonal fruit or vegetable with which you’ve never worked before.

On to the recipes!

Sometimes, we must fail so that others may learn. Although frankly, I’m not sure how any dessert featuring chocolate and hazelnuts could be a failure unless it was also laced with cyanide (and there would have to be a LOT of cyanide).

Despite the COMPLETE ABSENCE of cynanide, Fig & Cherry is less than thrilled with the Self-Saucing Chocolate Puddings from seemingly omnipresent Aussie foodie Donna Hay’s June/July 2008 magazine.
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Rebecca at Foodie with Family raids her cupboards and bookshelf to come up with some homemade tortillas from the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion. Not one to rest on her floury laurels, she topped them with bacony refried beans, beef, guac, lettuce and hot sauce.

Kudos for working bacon into a recipe that has nothing to do with bacon!

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The dynamic duo behind Fotocuisine pulled a little Trading Places to create this 40 clove garlic chicken with pasta carbonara.

They earn bonus points for (1) using a full half-pound of bacon, (2) spitting in the face of Rachael Ray and using the Better Homes and Gardens’ Big Book of 30-Minute Dinners, and (3) not being afraid to feature close-up photographs of Christey’s frighteningly misshapen thumbs.

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Ann of Redacted Recipes claims to be scared of me although I’m not sure why; I told her I was TOTALLY FRAMED on that arson thing. Maybe it’s because she brazenly flouted the rules, using a recipe from Martha Stewart’s website instead of a cookbook or magazine.

Still, I would think twice about committing aggravated assault against her if she’d make me some of these ravioli with egg yolk and truffle butter.

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[eatingclub] vancouver braves a tart dough ordeal to bring us this pine nut and ricotta tart from Mario Batali’s Molto Italiano.

No animals were harmed in the making of this tart, although a rolling pin was severely mangled and some ires were raised.

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Maybelle is a very lucky little girl who gets to eat things like curried chicken stew with potatoes, courtesy of Curried Favors: Family Recipes from South India by Maya Kaimal.

I can say now that she’s lucky; as a child, this would have horrified me and I would have pitied her. In fact, this child is probably already a more adventurous eater than I will ever be. Rock on with your curry-eating little self, Maybelle.

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The prodigious Joelen joins this culinary adventure with a recipe from the no-fail Here In America’s Test Kitchen.

She’s going meatless with some stovetop mac and cheese. As we all know, if you’re going to cut out the bacon, you need to make up for it with lots and lots of cheese. And she uses the First Thursdays badge in her post, which makes me feel important. Thanks!

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Pannifer’s Food and Such injects a much-needed shot of color into the roundup with some asparagus pesto with penne rigate spaghetti.

Her cookbook of choice, Truly, Madly Pasta: The Ultimate Book for Pasta Lovers, has quite the twee title, no? Then again, who am I to judge? Oh, right, the judgmental blog owner! That shit is twee. (But that doesnt mean I’d turn down a plate of this pasta.)

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Greedy Gourmet highly recommends BBC Good Food Magazine, and has never found one of its recipes to be a flop yet. Least of all this leek and bacon risotto.

Is it creepy that I think I have a crush on her flatware? It’s REALLY nice flatware.

• If you walked up to Ethel on the street and asked, “Are you happy to see me, or is that just a banana in your purse?” her response would be threefold: (1) “Who are you?” (2) “Don’t stand so close to my person.” and (3) “Yes, that is a banana in my purse.” At the end of our three-hour Babbo meal, she elbowed me in the ribs, pointed to the banana floating around her purse and husked, “for breakfast.”

• Ethel is frugal, and she likes to be prepared.

• Ethel does a lot of fine dining in New York City. She rates restaurants on a strict 10-point scale. This is not an impressionistic scale, like “That was pretty good but my chicken was on the dry side…I’d give this place a 7.” This is a very precise scale, and Ethel can enumerate the specific reason a restaurant lost points. Water glasses not refilled promptly? Minus one. Table needs to request the olive oil to go with bread service? Minus one. Food was excellent but coffee/tea was not offered at the proper time? (Some people like coffee after dessert, dontcha know.) Minus one.

• Ethel is horrified by high prices, despite her affinity to fine dining. At Babbo, I ordered strawberry gelato with a 15-year aged balsamic vinegar, which carries a $15 supplemental charge - not too freakish, considering the setting and that an excellent bottle of 15-year balsamic can run upward of $150. And how often do I eat at Babbo? Oh right, NEVER EVER. Ethel was first horrified and then bemused; I think that was the point at which she stopped thinking of me as “FRET’s blogging friend” and started seeing me as “that sweet mentally-impaired girl FRET took pity upon and invited to dinner.”

• Ethel would like you to know that she is NOT a tourist and is NOT IMPRESSED by a fancy name.

• Ethel demands impeccably attentive service along with excellent food to consider a restaurant truly good. Those of us who are willing to put up with slipshod service for orgasmically good food are ruining it for everyone else.

• Ethel is hilarious and I would gladly dine with her any night of the week.

FRET is wonderful and warm and funny and gorgeous and eats and lives with gusto and I had a great time with her and am thrilled to now count her as an “in real life” friend. But Ethel, Ethel I want to stuff into my tote bag so that I can have the benefit of her running commentary as I go about my daily business.

About Babbo: It was my first trip there, and I don’t think you can really judge a restaurant until you’ve eaten there more than once, but I speak for all three of us when I say “underwhelming.” All of our meals were pretty shockingly inconsistent; there was one truly transformative dish (a saffron infused panna cotta with rhubarb compote OH MY GOD), some highlights (gnocchi with oxtail, whole grilled branzino, warm lamb’s tongue salad), the merely solid (duck with kumquat and grilled treviso, rabbit with pancetta, carrots and peas) and the truly disappointing (goose liver ravioli with balsamic, calves’ brain ravioli).

We all expected a restaurant of Babbo’s caliber and reputation to maintain a consistent level of excellence - certainly, not every dish can be a toe-curler, but everything should be flavorful and perfectly executed - and there were far too many off moments (there’s no excuse for flavorless or poorly textured pasta at Babbo). Service was also not as attentive as Ethel would have preferred, and even I found our server a bit bumbling (although I do have to extend mille grazie to the wonderful maitre d’ and to the kitchen for all the lovely comps).

Oh, and the $15 balsamic? Totally worth it.

Coming Monday: The First First Thursday Roundup!

Okay, I know this is bad form. It’s my blog, it’s my inaugural event, and here I am, copping out and making a quick lunch so I can skip out on you to spend a night on the town. But here’s the thing: cook eat FRET is in town. And she’s now total BFFs with Joe Bastianich, co-owner of many of Mario Batali’s restaurants, so she managed to get this fancy-ass table at Babbo tonight. And I am not afraid to send a deluge of whiny emails to internet personages to secure reservations like this one. And her mother will be at dinner, so hopefully I’ll get a stock of embarrassing childhood stories I can use as blackmail to get more invitations to dinner like this. And so the circle of life continues. It’s beautiful, really.

I couldn’t not smack something down, though, so I decided to make a light lunch that would be worthy of the occasion but would be light enough so as not to impinge on this evening’s gastronomic adventure. Therefore: Chilled cucumber-yogurt soup with quinoa timbales, courtesy of Lorena Sass’ Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way. It’s a perfect refreshing summer lunch, or first course at a fancy vegetarian restaurant, the kind where vegans go for special occasions. (”Will you accept this cruelty-free Canadian diamond set in hemp as a gesture of my desire to spend my life with you in monogamous co-equal sustainable partnership?”)

I almost never get to take my photos in real daylight. Holy crap!

I’m a big fan of Whole Grains for its “basics” section: cooking instructions for any grain you might have around, from simple rice to amaranth. I don’t want to memorize the water-to-grain ratio for every grain I cook with, because then there’d be less brain real estate available for things like my weird Mt. Everest fixation or my opinion of the current crop of So You Think You Can Dance contestants. Until today I’ve never used any other part of the book, although many of the recipes look easy and tasty.

This soup’s centerpiece - the timbale, a little molded round of tabbouleh-like grain salad - was originally supposed to be coarse barley, but the recipe listed quinoa (which I like better) as a good substitution. Quinoa, dubbed the “mother of all grains” by the Incas, is a real super-food: it’s high in fiber, high in vitamins like magnesium and iron, is easy to digest and contains a complete set of amino acids, making it a complete protein. And since it comes from a non-grass plant (unlike, say, wheat or rice) it’s actually a seed and is considered a “pseudocereal,” which is kinda funny. To me.

This grain can caulk a leaky tub, change a tire and give you a back rub.

Most pre-packaged quinoa or bulk quinoa available at major retailers like Whole Foods require no pre-treatment, but some varieties might need pre-rinsing to remove their bitter, soap-y coating. Then you can cook: Unlike most grains, which are cooked in a relatively precise amount of liquid until they’ve absorbed it all and are tender, quinoa is best cooked in a big ol’ pot of (non-salted) boiling water and then drained in a mesh strainer. It’s a pretty quick study; mine was slightly overcooked after 12 minutes.

Once drained, I spread the quinoa out on a platter, sprinkled it with salt and olive oil, and left it to cool down while I dealt with the rest of the recipe.

Okay, so natural lighting can’t help EVERY picture.

The rest of the timbale was simple: chop some fresh mint, chop some tomato, toast and roughly crush some cumin seed, juice a lemon. Toss toss toss, a little more olive oil, a little more salt, and done.

And about dinner tonight: I’m going to Babbo.

I actually ended up doing this part in the fo-pro because of the quantity of cucumbers, but this picture was better.

The soup was even easier, requiring little more that chucking some shit in a blender - even simpler than my old favorite, “throwing some shit in a pan”! In this case, shit = chunks of peeled hothouse cukes, nonfat plain yogurt, a bit of milk*, lemon juice, olive oil and salt. I gave it a good, long buzz in the fo-pro with a couple of pauses to correct the seasoning (cucumbers can really take their salt).

To make the timbale, I put a ring mold in the middle of a wide, shallow bowl, heaped it full of the quinoa mix, added some diced cucumber on top. and pulled off the mold to create a neat little cylinder of quinoa. The soup got ladled around the timable, with a bit more diced cucumber sprinkled in.

*Or soy-gurt and milk, if you’re making this for your proposal dinner.

You gotta get messy at some point. I took great joy in demolishing the precise prissyness of this dish.

It was the perfect lunch for a sweltering summer’s day, the kind of day where turning on the stove or getting up to go to the bathroom seems like too much effort, the kind of day when you’re going out to dinner at Babbo that night. The components were just okay by themselves, but were fantastic together; every fresh ingredient had a chance to sound its own note, but the whole dish was also in perfect balance. The lemon and yogurt added tartness and brightness that elevated rather than overwhelmed the delicate cucumber. The quinoa brought a delightful texture and gentle nutty flavor. The mint in the timbale was the exact right amount - not too much, not too little - and the small amount present in every mouthful was lively but still allowed the cool cucumber to shine. It all came together in the time needed to cook the quinoa, and I have high hopes for the leftovers.

There are some tweaks I would make next time. Namely, cucumbers bring water enough to the party, and I don’t think the milk was necessary; I’d omit it and up the yogurt a little bit; I’d also add a bit more veg to the quinoa than the recipe calls for. There’s also room for a lot of personalization. You could easily bump up the flavor quotient of the soup by pureeing fresh herbs along with the cucumber (mint and/or dill come to mind) and can play with the veg in the timbale. A little diced pistachio would also play nicely with the other flavors in the timbale, and would add a fun new texture as well.

I can’t wait to see what you all come up with tonight. Me, I’ll be at Babbo. What, you hadn’t heard? And I’m not taking a camera or a notepad. Because sometimes, you just have to enjoy the ride.

Sometimes I wish I could post in 3-D, because that peanut? Totally looks like it’s poised to leap off the screen at you. That peanut will cut a bitch.

I often bemoan the fact that I am too fucking lazy* to get up early enough to make it to the Greenmarket in time for quickly snatched up, fleeting seasonal delicacies like ramps and garlic scapes. I salivate over other people’s beautiful photos, promise myself I’ll go this coming Saturday and then stay up late on Friday reading back issues of Love & Rockets and sleep until noon the next day (I’m fortunate to have equally lazy dogs who enjoy sleeping in on weekends).

Thankfully, I now have my own personal organic farmer to provide me with fleeting seasonal delicacies. Well, me and the 75 other people in my neighborhood CSA. He grows ‘em, he brings ‘em to the neighborhood, and I pick ‘em up after work and enjoy my beauty sleep guilt-free. So thank you, Farmer John, for enabling me to eat this delicious new potato and garlic scape puree with my pan-seared halibut and snap pea slaw.

*On a laziness scale of 1 to 10, I’m a 17. On a good day.**

**I REALLY like sleep.

Did you ever notice that new potatoes are about the same size and shape as prosthetic testicular implants? Me neither.

Garlic scape and new potato puree starts with, wait for it, potatoes. New ones, no less.

I could have peeled them before boiling, but (1) last time I tried to peel these smooth, gripless, tiny little fuckers, I mostly peeled my knuckles, (2) they’d take on less water if cooked snug in their jackets and (3) I planned to throw the lot of them in the food processor fo-pro* and then run the resulting puree through a fine mesh strainer, and remember what I said about the laziness?

*Remember, if you don’t all start using this in general parlance it’ll never catch on and I’ll never have my own branded line of TNS fo-pros.

The snap pea money shot.

While the potatoes cooked, I decided to throw together a crunchy garnish for the fish. I’d bookmarked [No Recipes]’s snap pea slaw. (Where does the apostrophe go, inside or outside the brackets? Am I thinking about this too hard?) It looked refreshing and crisp, like a perfect partner for some creamy puree and tender halibut. That, and I had some snap peas in the fridge.

I made a slight variant - the original recipe called for blanching the peas, which I skipped, and added mint, which I didn’t think would go with my dish - and ended up with a simple raw salad of thinly sliced peas, peanuts, rice wine vinegar, fish sauce and a dash of mirin.

Hypnotic.

When the potatoes neared doneness, I considered the scapes. I mean I really considered them; I felt them up for a minute and then laid them out on the cutting board, staring at them from several different angles. I’d used some of the scapes raw as a garnish, but had been holding on to the rest trying to think of something to do with them other than the ubiquitous garlic scape pesto.

For the three people out there who still don’t know what a garlic scape is, it’s the flexible, curly green shoot of a young garlic bulb. If left to grow, it straightens out and turns the familiar beige-y color of garlic peel, but if cut off at the curly green stage you get a tender veg with hints of garlicky sweetness and depth without the pungent bite. (It’s also a win-win for the farmer, since the garlic head remaining underground will grow larger; keeping the shoot attached slows growth).

A fresh but mild garlicky flavor was a natural match with creamy young yukon golds - who among us does not love garlic mashed potatoes? If you don’t, I will give you a 15 second head start on your flight from this place - and a silky puree seemed like an elegant pairing for some simply prepared fish. Ergo, scape-potato puree.

This was maybe not the best candidate for the fo-pro-cam.*

I tossed the still-warm potatoes, blanched scapes, a knob (heh) of butter and a hearty pinch of kosher salt into the fo-pro and gave everything a whizz. While it blended, I poured in heavy cream and milk in little by little until I had a smooth puree of the ideal viscosity - thicker than a blended soup, thinner than mashed potatoes, easy to spread on a plate but not runny.

I passed the mix through my finest fine-mesh strainer - I still don’t own a tamis - to get out any lumps, bits of potato skin or unprocessed shards of scape, and was rewarded with an unbelievably creamy puree of the most delicate pale green. It was almost enough to send me into a Nigella-esque rapture about how scapes capture the verdant essence of the damp English springtime,** but I held it together. Mostly.

While I struggled to contain myself, Brian pan-seared a gorgeous hunk of halibut filet seasoned only with salt and pepper. I didn’t take any pictures of this part because, you know, the rapture and all.

*Another possible branding opportunity?

**I don’t know if this is actually the case, but it sounds like something I imagine the caricature of Nigella I carry around in my head would say.

Form of scorpion!

I smeared a good dollop of scape and potato across my dish (my yin-yang shape turned into more of a bulbous scorpion tail, but this won’t happen to you), nestled a hunk of halibut into the puree and topped it with a handful of the raw snap peas. I took my pictures and then sat down with my plate while Brian made his dish, and I’m not at all ashamed to say that I was 75% done eating by the time he made it to the table. When he was partway through his meal, I was standing at the stove scraping puree remnants out of the bowl with my fingers. And when our neighbors stopped by with their dog for a puppy play date (I know, I know), I uncharacteristically shooed them out of the apartment and told them to come back in 15 minutes. (I don’t know about you, but I like to lick my dishware clean in peace.)

You may surmise from the foregoing that this was really frigging tasty. Halibut has always been one of my favorite fish, especially when it has a nice seared crust, and snap peas have to be one of the most fun vegetables around; I ate all my garnish off the fish and then scarfed all the peas left in the mixing bowl. The combo of hot, perfectly cooked fish with crisp, cool sweet slaw would have been excellent in and of itself.

But it was not in and of itself, because there was garlic scape and new potato puree. Rich but light on the tongue, creamy but not heavy, sweet yet assertive, it was barely recognizable as the sum of its humble parts. It was the perfect foil to both fish and slaw, though I could easily have eaten a bowl of it alone.

I’ll probably still make the garlic scape pesto - well, as long as Farmer John provides the hook-up - because it’s the thing to do. But I’ll dream about this puree.

Garlic Scape-Potato Puree
1 lb. young yukon gold or creamer potatoes
6-8 oz. fresh garlic scapes
3 tbsp. unsalted butter
1/4 to 1/2 c. heavy cream, half and half or milk
s&p to taste

Place the potatoes, unpeeled, in a large pot; cover them with cold water and bring to a boil. Cook until they are easily pierced with a fork, 15-25 minutes (depending on the size of your potatoes). Remove them with a slotted spoon and deposit in the bowl of your fo-pro, keeping the boiling water on the stove.

Add the scapes to the boiling water. Blanch for 2-3 minutes, until they are bright green. (If you want a less assertive garlic flavor, keep them in a minute longer; more assertive, a minute less or skip blanching altogether.) Drain and add the scapes to the fo-pro.

Add the butter to the fo-pro and process. Once the potatoes and scapes have started to break down, slowly pour in the cream/milk until you have a smooth mixture that’s thinner and creamier than mashed potatoes.

Press the puree through a mesh sieve to remove bits of skin and scape chunks. (You can skip this if you don’t mind a more textured puree). Adjust the seasoning. Serve immediately, or hold over low heat until dinnertime, whisking in a bit more milk if needed to maintain the texture.

Complete instructions are here.

If you’re one of those folks who likes badge-y type things, this is for you. Now go! Go! Go!

I’m going to tell you right now: this post? Is not really funny. Feel free to leave if that’s a problem, and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming later this week.

As you can imagine, it’s been a bit of a rough weekend; I haven’t really felt like cooking, let alone photographing and describing my meals in detail. Funerals and their associated activities are always kinda rough, and I’m not nearly far enough in the mourning process for my own father not to have all that shit get dredged up, compounding things. Blargh.

I gotta tell you, the Orthodox Jews and their burial services? I to the N to the T-E-N-S-E. It’s so…biblical, with the actual rending of garments and the shoveling and the Hebrew and the phlegm. I’m emotionally drained just thinking about it.

No, THIS, isn’t the pork duh.

After an afternoon of going through old photos of me and my dad and getting weepy-eyed*, I needed something (1) tasty enough to entice me to eat it, (2) quick and easy enough to force myself to get up and make it, (3) that is not a bagel (Jewish mourning involves a LOT of bagels) and (4) cheap. And in my book, all of that points to one thing: pork.

In particular, sausage. I’m Italian and I grew up near the Jersey Shore, and that means that I have both genetic and environmental predispositions to sausage. I wanted the essence of a classic down-the-shore sausage sandwich, but without the enormous hoagie roll and with a smaller amount of sausage to keep costs and triglycerides down. So: sausage and pepper orzo.

*90% because of my dad, 10% because of all the TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE haircuts I’ve had over the years. Why did no one tell me?

THERE’S the sausage.

I never actually spent a lot of time at the beaches adjacent to Jersey’s boardwalks, because I was a nerdy, bookish, classical-music playing precocious yet freakishly tall dork and not a hot bikini babe with a penchant for airbrushed t-shirts and heinous tan lines. But the boardwalks were another story. Predictably, my mother hated them and their disgusting American foodstuffs. My dad and I? Boardwalk food fiends. Sometimes my dad and I would head to the (non-boardwalk, nature preserve) beach first, but more often we’d drive down nights just for the holy trinity of Jersey boardwalk eating: sausage and peppers, frozen custard and zeppole.

I know some people are partial to the fried clams and enormous, 28-inch pizzas. Not everyone can be right about everything, y’know? Plus, more zeppole for me.

The veg.

I admit that when I was younger, I was an incredibly picky eater. I NEVER got onions and peppers on my sausage sandwich, and would pick off the slightest particle found clinging to my sausage; I had the super-magnifying vision young children seem to have when it comes to shit like that. Frankly, had I been left to my own devices, I probably would have eaten nothing by zeppole, like the time I went to stay with my relatives in Italy one summer without my parents and absolutely refused to eat anything but gelato. (One day record: 8 cones.) (I was only 6. I’m pretty sure I could beat that today.)

Thank god I came around, because life without onions? Terrifying.

Yer classic throw-shit-in-a-pan meal.

I crumbled the sausage links before frying to extract more delicious sausage juice fat, in which I sauteed the peppers and onions. I wanted to add another layer of flavor and recalled that often, the pepper component of sausage and peppers is cooked with some vinegar for added bite, so I deglazed the pan with a splash of balsamic (white would be nice here but I only had regular, so that’s what I used). The vinegar added an ever-so-slight glaze to the veggies.

For 2 servings: One sweet sausage link, $1.68. One yellow onion, $0.66. One pepper, $1.74. One and a half cups of orzo, $0.53. Shaving of cheese: negligible. Grand total, $4.61, or $2.30 per person.

I tossed the slick, sausage-y mess with cooked orzo, heaped some into a bowl and shaved a little pecorino on top for salt. And even though I didn’t feel like eating and had fully planned to save my portion for lunch and lie to you all about how it tasted, I took one bite and ended up finishing the whole bowl. It was everything I’d wanted it to be - quick, cheap and tasty, sure, but also transporting and comforting. Fennel-laden sausage, sweet barely-caramelized peppers and onions bathed in pork fat, tart but not overpowering vinegar and occassional punches of salty cheese with just a little starch in each bite. Add some fresh lemonade and fried dough, and I could have been back in Seaside Heights trying to hit one of those fucking rubber frogs into the rotating lilypads to try and win a stuffed Deputy Dawg.

Now go call your fathers and tell them you love them. If you don’t have yours either, then go eat something the two of your enjoyed. If you don’t have either, or your dad kinda sucked, then make this. My dad was a good guy, I don’t think he’d mind sharing.

Sausage and Pepper Orzo
Do you really need a recipe? I’ll give it to you anyway. BTW, this is also good at room-temperature.

1 link sweet or hot Italian sausage
1 medium yellow onion, peeled and cut into half-moons
1 large bell pepper, any color, cored, seeded and sliced
1 1/2 c. orzo
2 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
s&p to taste and for the pasta water

Bring a pot of water to the boil. Add a few teaspoons of salt and the orzo. Cook according to package directions. Set aside.

Chop or break the sausage up into small chunks. Heat a heavy skillet over medium heat and add the sausage. Fry until sausage is mostly browned and has released some fat, 4-5 minutes. Add the pepper and onion and saute until the veggies have started to color a little but are not completely limp. Pour the balsamic into the pan and scrape up any brown sausage-y bits sticking to the pan.

Dump the cooked orzo and sausage mixture into a large bowl. Toss to combine. Grate some parm or pecorino over the top, if you’d like.

ETA: Thanks for the good wishes, everyone, I really appreciate it.

It’s refreshing, light, fruity but tart, utterly irresistible. It looks so civilized, doesn’t it? Like something you would serve to the ladies who lunch when they come over for the garden party benefiting the foundation one of them started to purchase wheeled carts for paralyzed needy dachshunds. I almost don’t want to tell you what it really is, because I don’t want to damage my reputation as ONE CLASSY BITCH.

Sigh…you know I can never keep a secret from you.

It’s beer. Specifically, beer granita, aka frozen beer. No added sugar, no added fruit, no added anything, just beer. Frozen. Served in a cute teacup and garnished with fresh fruit, but a cup of frozen beer nonetheless. And it is WONDERFUL and you will all go and make it this very weekend and you will swoon, I promise you.

Have I mentioned that it’s FROZEN BEER? Beer for dessert! I think this might finally get me that Nobel I’ve been after. If frozen dessert beer can’t create lasting world peace, what can? Surely not specialty malt beverages; it was the frozen Mike’s Hard Lemonade that got us into this mess.*

Granita is the simplest, most accessible frozen dessert around. No fancy equipment needed, just a pan and a fork. Typically, it’s made with sweetened fruit juices or purees, or sweet, strong espresso. You pour the liquid of your choosing into a shallow dish, stash it in the freezer, and scrape with a fork once every half hour to an hour to break up the forming ice and create a delicate, crystalline, icy fluff. It can be eaten as is or paired with something a little richer and creamier, espresso granita with whipped cream being the classic example.

*I would never freeze Mike’s Hard Lemonade, but fresh lemonade with a hint of vodka would make a smashing granita in more ways than one.

The stages of beer freezitude.

Well, beer is a liquid, is it not? The photos would seem to indicate that. And while I wouldn’t waste my time freezing a pan of Budweiser (although that might actually make it better…but I’m still not doing it) there are plenty of wonderful, complex beers I’ve always thought would be excellent candidates for this treatment.

High on my list to try was fruit lambic. Lambic is a traditional Belgian beer made with wild yeast native to the Brussels area; the wild yeast produces a distinctive cider-y flavor and funky aftertaste. It’s often brewed with fruit - pure lambic is unbearably sour - the most popular and easy-to-find flavors being raspberry, peach, sour cherry, currant and green apple (I’ve heard tell of banana, but while I like both bananas and beer, the idea of banana beer makes me throw up in my mouth the tiniest bit).

The raspberry, peach and apple are my favorites, and any would make a lovely granita. But I happened to have a bottle of Lindeman’s Framboise (raspberry) lingering in the fridge for several weeks - we’d originally bought it to make beer floats but I kept eating all the ice cream before we got around to the float part - so it was conscripted for the cause and thrust into the freezer.

Last year, we raised enough for 35 dachshund carts. Let’s make it 50 this year - open your hearts and wallets, ladies!

Four hours of intermittent scraping later, I had a huge fluffy pile of tart raspberry granita with a slight boozy bite and shades of the distinctive Belgian beer funk. Chilling usually mutes flavors, but this granita still sings on the tongue.* I added a little scoop of vanilla ice cream and a sprinkling of fresh raspberries and had 10 minutes of frozen beer reverie.

Aside from tasting great and being insanely refreshing on a warm, humid night, you can also heap beer granita into a sno-cone holder and walk around the neighborhood eating it or offering it to young children and no one will be the wiser, something you can’t do with beer in a bottle. So granita is arguably the superior form of beer.

You can make granita with anything - fruit, herbs, wine, even vegetables. But what could be more humble, more all-American than (imported Belgian) beer?

*It sings drunken bar songs. 99 cups of granita on the wall, 99 cups of granita…

Lambic Granita
Pour one 750ml bottle of the fruit lambic of your choosing into a pan. Stick the pan in the freezer. Stir/scrape the ice crystals every 30-40 minutes until the mixture is completely frozen into fluffy ice crystals. Eat it immediately or eat it later, but definitely eat it.

Did I make this dinner just so I could gloat about my infinitely awesome egg-poaching skills?  I may have.  But maybe I ALSO made it so I could gloat about my willingness to make things painstakingly by hand - let us not forget the angel hair cucumbers - rather than relying on the modern conveniences that would hasten dinner’s journey to my table. Because I? Am better than you.

To wit: fresh, hand rolled and cut pasta tossed with onions, garlic, red spinach and bacon and topped with a poached egg. Proof that cheap can still be pretentious!

Brian is kind of a clean freak, and I was SO, SO GLAD he wasn’t home for this part.

I knew I wanted to do pasta with a poached egg tonight and had been planning on doing it with orzo, thinking that the gooey yolk would make a lovely, unctuous coating for the teeny pasta bits. Which it would, but there was something unsatisfying about it. I’ve been wanting to make my own pasta for a while, but I don’t own a roller and thought that trying to roll it by hand would be tedious and ineffective. Which it was. Tedious (and a little painful), I mean. But after sitting down to this meal - which will be making regular appearances on my plate for breakfast, lunch, second lunch, dinner, supper, third lunch and nonce* - there is no doubt of its effectiveness.

*This is not a meal, it’s a monastic prayer time. But I needed another word and “nonce” makes me laugh.**

**It’s not like you didn’t already know that I’m a giant nerd.

Fine, maybe I used SOME modern conveniences. Shut up.

I looked at several fresh pasta recipes to get an idea of the flour-to-egg ratio before deciding on one egg for every three ounces of flour, a formula pretty much akin to Mario Batali’s. I suppose I could have done everything in the stand mixer, but I love making the little flour well and incorporating the eggs by hand; my skin starts to glow azure with my extreme Italian-ness. A helpful tip for you: when you do this, you will do it on your largest cutting board or work surface, not your smallest. Not that I did that. But you might, so I thought I’d warn you.

After incorporating the eggs and flour, I inaugurated the Professional 600’s uber-mega-dough hook (I’m a yeastophobe, so it gets depressingly infrequent use) for kneading. I also found different knead times, and decided to stick with Batali for consistency’s sake: 15 minutes. I recommend that you spend that time reading trashy, heavy-handed feminist sci-fi.

When the kneading period ended, I wrapped the smoothly elastic dough in plastic and let it rest for 30 minutes while I read more trashy, heavy-handed feminist sci-fi helped six old ladies cross the road, rescued a kitten from a tree and adopted two Malawian orphans.

In southern Italy, a single tear of joy is running down my nonna’s cheek.

After the rest, I dusted a bit of flour on my pastry board, split the dough into four smaller chunks and got a-rollin’. The dough was nice and sturdy and tear-resistant, so I didn’t have to curse at it or nothin’.

I wasn’t sure how thin I’d be able to get the dough by hand without ripping it to shreds, but with enough elbow grease and careful handling I was able to roll it so thinly that the veining in the marble board was clearly visible through the dough.

How do you like THEM apples?

I sliced each sheet of pasta into thick ribbons; I was aiming for about three-quarters of an inch wide but ended up all over the map, which I declare is part of the charm of hand-cut pasta and not a flaw. I tossed the strands - I suppose, technically, the pappardelle - with a little cornmeal to keep them from sticking together, and set them aside for a few minutes while I turned to the spinach and onions.

These are no ordinary onions.

Well, okay, they are plain old yellow onions, which I guess is pretty ordinary. HOWEVER, these specific yellow onions are being sauteed in bacon fat. While I’m counting the cost of the bacon toward the total for this meal, bacon is, for me a pantry staple. When I buy a package, I roll each slice up and freeze the little rolls individually. When they’re frozen but good, I toss ‘em in a ziploc. When I need a little bacon for a dish I can pull out as many or as few slices as I want without thawing a whole package, and the individual rolls can be sliced and diced so you can go right from freezer to pan with no advance planning.

Maybe this is already how everyone is storing their bacon, but I was proud of myself.

In this case, I pulled out four slices, cooked them down, then removed the crispy bacon and most of the fat (which is ALWAYS TO BE SAVED) before adding onions and garlic to the pan.

Purty.

When the onions were golden and the garlic fragrant, I added a bunch of chopped red spinach, threw the bacon back in and let the veggies wilt down and mingle with the onion. This beautiful red spinach came from our first CSA box of the season along with some snap peas, lettuce and lots of garlic scapes, but any kind of spinach (or other dark green - rainbow chard, which is in season now, would be quite good) could take its place. In fact, if you keep frozen spinach in the freezer, then you’d most likely have all the ingredients needed for this dish at any given time.

I was going to add the scapes as well, but that would have pushed me over the $5 limit. I was tempted, though, as an easy out for my scapes; tasty though it may be, I don’t want to make the same garlic scape pesto that everyone and their mother is making. Although I probably will.

But you’re not here to read about my scape-related anxieties, which, while legion, have no bearing on this meal. So: I set the veggie mix aside while I poached the eggs and cooked the pasta.

First rule of egg poaching: never talk about egg poaching.

I can talk a big talk, but when it comes down to it, I’m not much of horn-tooter…except when it comes to egg poaching. I AM THE MASTER AND THE COMMANDER OF THE POACHED EGG. I fall down the stairs on a daily basis for no good reason, but I can poach the holy hell out of an egg. I’ve written about my method before, although I should reveal that I’ve left a critical step out of my instructions to prevent anyone else from gaining the egg-poaching upper hand.*

This time, I was slightly more harried than usual because I was trying to coordinate the timing of the poached eggs and fresh pasta, which requires an enormous pot of boiling water but then cooks in three nanoseconds. I wanted very runny yolks to coat the pasta, so I didn’t want the hot eggs to spend too much time sitting around waiting for pasta. In the end, they sat for a minute longer than I would have preferred, but with no major overcooking.

*Okay, not really. Or did I?

Flour, garlic and onions, pantry staples. Five total eggs, $1.05. Bunch of spinach, $2.49. One-quarter of a package of bacon, $1.28. Total cost, $4.82, or $2.41 per person.

I removed the cooked pasta to the pan with the spinach mix, along with some of the pasta cooking water, and tossed everything to combine. I heaped some of the pasta into a bowl, topped it with the egg and sprinkled it with some extra bacon bits (and okay, fine, some chopped garlic scapes). I immediately broke the egg open and mixed it into the pasta. I grated in a little cheese - also a pantry staple, some kind of hard grating cheese should always be in your fridge, and a little goes a long way - as well.

This dinner, I would pay serious money for it in a restaurant, and not just because I love bacon. The fresh pasta was amazing - amazing texture, perfectly cooked, eggy and wonderful - and the salty bacon was perfectly balanced by the sweet onion, pungent garlic and biting spinach. The runny egg yolk, starchy pasta water and heat of the dish coated everything in a layer of yum, and the egg brought some needed protein to the dish.

As testament to the deliciousness of the fresh pasta I can report that after cleaning his plate, Brian went back to the stove and finished off the remaining severely overcooked pasta that had been sitting in its pot of water, and did so with great gusto. What else do you need to know?

Hand-Rolled Pasta
You can use any veggie you like for the dish above. Try to time the pasta and egg so that the egg is barely cooked and still runny inside when the pasta is done.
9 oz. AP or Italian tipo 00 flour
3 large eggs

Make the dough: You can either dump the flour on a work surface, make a well for the eggs and combine them with your hands or a fork, or do the mixing directly in the bowl of a stand mixer.

When they are fully combined and form a ball, knead (again by hand or with a stand mixer) for 15 minutes. After kneading, wrap the dough in plastic wrap and set on the counter to rest for half an hour.

Roll and cut the pasta: After the rest period, break the dough up into 3 or 4 smaller balls. Dust a work surface with flour. With a rolling pin, roll the dough from the middle out to the edge, turning the dough 90 degrees after each pass. Continue rolling until you can see your work surface through the dough; this took me about 5 minutes per dough ball.

Use a sharp knife or pizza cutter to slice the sheets of dough into noodles of your desired thickness; I like 3/4 inch. If not cooking immediately, toss with a little cornmeal or semolina to keep the noodles from sticking and set aside on a baking sheet until you’re ready to use them.

Cook: Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and add a teaspoon of salt (fresh pasta will absorb a lot more salt than dried, so don’t go overboard). Add the pasta and cook until it floats to the surface, 1-2 minutes.

Remove the pasta with tongs and add it to whatever sauce you’re using. Toss to combine and serve immediately.