Foodgasms

I am so making this, this weekend

Polenta Sausage Mozzarella Casserole
http://www.elise.com/recipes/photos/polenta-sausage-casserole.jpg
5 1/2 Tbsp olive oil
1 can (28 ounces) crushed tomatoes
1 Tbsp chopped fresh oregano
1 med yellow onion, halved lengthwise then cut into wedges
1 medium bell pepper (red, green, orange or yellow), cut lengthwise into thin slices
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon red chili flakes
1 pound Italian sausage (removed from casings), sweet or spicy
2 pounds of prepared polenta, 1/2-inch slices if using prepared polenta in a tube (can use one recipe of creamy polenta, leave out the cream cheese)
1/2 pound (8 ounces) fresh mozzarella, 1/4-inch slices

1 Preheat oven broiler on high. Heat 3 Tbsp of oil in a 2-3 qt saucepan on medium heat. Add tomatoes and oregano, simmer, uncovered for 15 minutes.

2 While the tomatoes are cooking, in a large frying pan, heat 1 Tbsp oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion, bell pepper, garlic, salt, pepper, and chili flakes. Cover the pan, lower the heat to medium, and cook until the vegetables have softened, about 5 minutes. Add the sausage, stirring and breaking it into small pieces as it cooks, about 5 minutes. Cover the pan and cook until vegetables are tender and the sausage is cooked through, about 5-8 more minutes. Add the tomato sauce and simmer for 10 minutes.

3 While the sauce is cooking, coat the bottom of a 9x13-inch baking pan with a 1 Tbsp oil. Add the cooked polenta (or slices) to the pan. Coat the top of the polenta with the remaining 1/2 Tbsp oil. Broil the polenta about 4 inches from the heating element until golden brown and crispy, about 10-15 minutes.


4 Pour sauce over broiled polenta, then arrange Mozzarella slices over the top and return the casserole to the broiler. Broil until the cheese is melted and beginning to brown, about 2 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes before serving.

Makes 6 servings.

Tatiana0706 said:

Polenta Sausage Mozzarella Casserole
http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/4881/polentasausagecasserolech2.jpg

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Sounds awesome....please send the leftovers...

KravMaga said:

Sounds awesome....please send the leftovers...

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if it turns out the way the picture looks, I will be sending you an empty pan!

Home Made Marshmallows

Ingredients
3 envelopes of Knox gelatin
1/2 cup cold water
2 cups granulated sugar
2/3 cups corn syrup
1/4 cup water
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
Confectioners' sugar for dredging


Instructions
In the bowl of an electric mixer, sprinkle gelatin over 1/2 cup cold water. Soak for 10 minutes. Combine sugar, corn syrup, and 1/4 cup water in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil and boil hard for 1 minute. Pour boiling syrup into gelatin and mix at high speed. Add the salt and beat for 12 minutes. Add vanilla and incorporate into mixture. Scrape into a 9 x 9-inch pan lined with oiled plastic wrap and spread evenly. (Note: Lightly oil hands and spatula or bowl scraper). After pouring marshmallow mixture into the pan, take another piece of plastic wrap and press mixture into the pan.

Let mixture sit for a few hours. Remove from pan, dredge the marshmallow slab with confectioners' sugar and cut into 12 equal pieces with scissors (the best tool for the job) or a chef's knife. Dredge each piece of marshmallow in confectioners' sugar.

Dip 'em in 70% cocoa dark chocolate......yummmmy.

Tatiana0706 said:

if it turns out the way the picture looks, I will be sending you an empty pan!

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It looks and sounds INCREDIBLE. I love polenta!

The polenta sausage looks great, but you'd need good sausage. What do you tell a meatman, just "eyetalian sausage"? The stuff I've gotten from the supermarket was not all that good.

I need some foodgasms. I'm living on sandwiches here. Lunch was 4 twenty five cent bags of cheese puffs from a truck.

ShamelessFlirt said:

Roasted garlic soup

Yield: 4 servings

4 Garlic heads (about 1/2 Pound total), unpeeled
1/4 c Olive oil
6 tb (3/4 stick) unsalted Butter
4 Leeks (white part only), Chopped
1 Onion, diced
6 tb All purpose flour
4 c Chicken stock, heated
1/3 c Dry Sherry
1 c Whipping cream
Fresh lemon juice
Salt and fresh ground
White pepper
2 tb Chopped fresh chives

Preheat oven to 350°F. Cut off top 1/4 inch of each garlic head. Place garlic heads in small shallow baking dish. Drizzle oil over. Bake until golden, about 1 hour. Cool slightly.

Press individual garlic cloves between thumb and finger to release garlic. Chop garlic. Melt butter in heavy large saucepan over medium heat. Add garlic, leeks and onion and saute until onion is translucent, about 8 minutes. Reduce heat to low. Add flour and cook 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in hot stock and Sherry. Simmer 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Cool slightly. Puree soup in batches in blender or processor. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Cover and refrigerate.) Return soup to saucepan. Add cream and simmer until thickened, about 10 minutes. Add lemon juice to taste. Season with salt and white pepper. Ladle into bowls. Garnish with chives and croutons below.


Thyme croutons

stir together 2 tablespoons of olive oil, 1 tablespoon of thyme, salt and pepper in a medium bowl. Add 1 (8 ounce) loaf French bread, cubed, and toss to coat. Spread the cubes out on a baking sheet. Bake for about 10 minutes in the oven until golden brown. Stir occasionally for even toasting.

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Oh boy. I have got to try this.

rosco rathbone said:

The polenta sausage looks great, but you'd need good sausage. What do you tell a meatman, just "eyetalian sausage"? The stuff I've gotten from the supermarket was not all that good.

I need some foodgasms. I'm living on sandwiches here. Lunch was 4 twenty five cent bags of cheese puffs from a truck.

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Yeah, I've been too busy running around to do much serious cooking myself. I'm going to rectify that this weeeknd. What I make will be determined at least in part by the weather. I'm hoping for a cold front, as I'm craving some hot comfort food, like that lamb and butternut recipe.

Waxing rhapsodic on garlic

Aioli is one of my all-time favorite decadent treats to make, and I alternate between several different varieties. Lately I have been making a roasted garlic aioli. The roasted garlic is really more of a "garlic confit", as it is actually slow poached in oil, which gives you not only delicious sweet "roasted" garlic, but also a wonderful garlic oil as a "by-product" (I use both in the aioli). The oil actually ends up being more useful than the garlic, as you can easily drizzle it over just about anything.

We frequent this restaurant in L.A. that has a family-style dinner once a week. Every week focuses on a different "theme" (South Indian, Moroccan, Provencal, Spanish Tapas, others too numerous to name). One of the most decadent themes is simply called "The Grand Aioli," and it centers around massive quantities of homemade aioli and pesto, with a bewildering variety of things to dip into each (grilled veggies, meat, fish, you name it).

As for garlic bread, I prefer it in its simplest form, literally garlic and bread: take a clove of raw garlic and rub it on a piece of warm grilled bread, drizzle with a bit of olive oil. Yum.

tortoise said:

Yeah, I've been too busy running around to do much serious cooking myself. I'm going to rectify that this weeeknd. What I make will be determined at least in part by the weather. I'm hoping for a cold front, as I'm craving some hot comfort food, like that lamb and butternut recipe.

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People ought to make a concentrate effort to cook recipes from this thread and acknowledge. Also, anyone with a cam should take pictures of the pan on the stove and post.

ANyone know any good turnip recipes? Now that the season of roots is here.

tortoise said:

As for garlic bread, I prefer it in its simplest form, literally garlic and bread: take a clove of raw garlic and rub it on a piece of warm grilled bread, drizzle with a bit of olive oil. Yum.

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I prefer my garlic roasted, and the bread fresh from the oven. Raw garlic is a little harsh for me. I usually spread a clove of roast garlic on a hunk of bread, then add some goat cheese on top.

rosco rathbone said:

People ought to make a concentrate effort to cook recipes from this thread and acknowledge. Also, anyone with a cam should take pictures of the pan on the stove and post.

ANyone know any good turnip recipes? Now that the season of roots is here.

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I think the acknowledgments and the pictures are both a fine, fine idea, rapscallion. I am going to do that when I try recipes from this thread, hopefully this weekend.

My favorite thing to do with any and all root vegetables is to cut them into chunks, coat with evoo, salt, poivre, and roast in a hot (425) oven. It's fun to mix and match them, too (carrots, turnips, parsnips, celery root, rutabagas, onions). Simple, yes, but the roasting creates great depth of flavor, so anything more would be gilding a lily. I'll occasionally add some thyme or rosemary, but that's about it.

gravyrug said:

I prefer my garlic roasted, and the bread fresh from the oven. Raw garlic is a little harsh for me. I usually spread a clove of roast garlic on a hunk of bread, then add some goat cheese on top.

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Delicious!

Yeah, raw garlic can be overpowering. If you lightly rub it on crostini, though, it's really more imparting a light garlic scent than a flavor. But I absolutely love roasted garlic, too, so you'll get no argument from me there.

I do that with the roots, too, but I usually add a whole stick of butter with the evoo. You can't beat butter.

rosco rathbone said:

I do that with the roots, too, but I usually add a whole stick of butter with the evoo. You can't beat butter.

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Butter is delicious with roots. You'll want to roast them at a lower temperature, though, if you use butter. Either that, or roast them hot and add the butter after. I do this with my sweet potatoes.

Add a chicken stuffed with lemons, garlics, rosemary and coated with sea salt and fresh ground black poivre and drenched in butter and evoo and you have a winner. I also like big onion wedges.

I must have heaps of fresh lemon juice in my aoili. Must. It has to have a ZING and not just a BANG.

I know exactly where my love of garlic originates: The Bread & Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus. It took place minutes away from my home and was large part of my life while growing up. The founder, Peter Schumann, built a large clay stove in the middle of Grasshopper Field just behind his house. Every year in July, the green hills filled with hippies and yuppies, and all you could smell was sweat, weed, and Peter's aioli. In the beginning he used egg yolks but as the summers grew warmer, he stopped and just used oil. He'd get a huge group of us to sit there in the sun, peeling sticky garlic cloves. We'd have silky garlic skins all the way up our arms, stuck in our hair and covering our feet! People would line up to take free slices of his freshly-baked sourdough rye, slathered with that nose-tingling aioli which always dripped its way down to your elbows.

http://www.pbpub.com/bread&puppet/images/bread-hands.jpg

Tinkersquash said:

I must have heaps of fresh lemon juice in my aoili. Must. It has to have a ZING and not just a BANG.

I know exactly where my love of garlic originates: The Bread & Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus. It took place minutes away from my home and was large part of my life while growing up. The founder, Peter Schumann, built a large clay stove in the middle of Grasshopper Field just behind his house. Every year in July, the green hills filled with hippies and yuppies, and all you could smell was sweat, weed, and Peter's aioli. In the beginning he used egg yolks but as the summers grew warmer, he stopped and just used oil. He'd get a huge group of us to sit there in the sun, peeling sticky garlic cloves. We'd have silky garlic skins all the way up our arms, stuck in our hair and covering our feet! People would line up to take free slices of his freshly-baked sourdough rye, slathered with that nose-tingling aioli which always dripped its way down to your elbows.

http://www.pbpub.com/bread&puppet/images/bread-hands.jpg

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I use a ridiculous amount of fresh lemon and lime juice in my cooking. It adds so much brightness to so many things.

The Bread & Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus sounds absolutely amazing, Tinks. I'm just grinning from ear to ear, reading that. I would have loved to be there!

rosco rathbone said:

The polenta sausage looks great, but you'd need good sausage. What do you tell a meatman, just "eyetalian sausage"? The stuff I've gotten from the supermarket was not all that good.

I need some foodgasms. I'm living on sandwiches here. Lunch was 4 twenty five cent bags of cheese puffs from a truck.

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want me to send you a care package next week?

Hester said:

want me to send you a care package next week?

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Hester, do you make your own sausage?

Tatiana0706 said:

Hester, do you make your own sausage?

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a kitchen-aid with attachments, sausage skins, this book, and a friend to help with the stuffing, and you're good to go.

CrackerjackHrt said:

a kitchen-aid with attachments, sausage skins, this book, and a friend to help with the stuffing, and you're good to go.

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you know, I bought that attachment for my kitchen-aid YEARS ago, and I have never taken it out of the box...I really need to do that.

Tatiana0706 said:

you know, I bought that attachment for my kitchen-aid YEARS ago, and I have never taken it out of the box...I really need to do that.

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it's time consuming and messy as hell. the final product, though, makes it well worth the effort.

for many years, once a year i would make sausage with three friends. we made huge batches of three or four types. (it's good in the freezer for almost a year.) it was always a lot of fun.

time to do that again. your post put a bug in my ear.

I tried my hand at sausage making but I was a little disappointed in the end results. I bought two delicata squashes to ring in the season with some sausages on the side, though. Squash and sausage - two great tastes that taste great together.

That garlic soup recipe made me swoon. Thyme croutons. Just yum.

I've always wanted to give sausage making a go, myself. I have visions of inventing wild new combinations.

In other news, it is supposed to be cool here this weekend, so it's high time for some hot foodgasms. I'm really, really craving a roasted winter root vegetable medley, so that will be one of them.

I had a neighbor in my duplex who would whip up this delectable root vegetable gratin. I miss him solely for that. He played guitar until the wee hours of the morning, and he was often late with the rent, but that gratin won him favor with me.

I should have gotten the recipe before he moved to Oregon.