I travel a lot these days, both for business and pleasure, and that used to mean subjecting myself to horrid coffee and middling tea. No more, thanks to a couple of simple gadgets and my wife’s ever-present patience during packing.

We carry with us a Mukka Express by Bialetti to make cappuccino-like and latte-like drinks that, while not as good as one gets at a great cafe, a far sight better than what the average North American restaurant serves, and on par with average European coffee. In Europe we use a grinder we’d bought at a Monoprix in Paris, but it works on 220 volts, and doesn’t give us a fine enough grind at 110 volts, so we either need a North American option or a dual-voltage converter system. We usually carry coffee beans from Kicking Horse, a good Canadian company and demerera sugar, leaving only milk to buy on site, and most places have milk. (This proved a little tougher in Bangalore, but I’ll leave that for another story.)

Tea requires less work and less complicated equipment. We’ve recently grown fond of a portable, durable infuser by ForLife Design, and leaves from TeaHaus, another fine Canadian company. No more Tetley; no more Red Rose. Even most hotel coffee makers heat water hot enough for good tea.

So it takes some more effort, and some extra room in our suitcases, but when you travel as much as we do, you value a good cappuccino in the morning and good tea to aid the digestion later in the day.

I was about to make french toast for brunch, when Suzanne says “Why don’t you make a frittata, you could finish up that bit of broccoli.” Why yes, I think, and the mushrooms. And since I had just beat the eggs and cream, and not gotten any further … why not? After all, french toast & frittata are basically the same … up until you have the eggs beaten anyway. Then they start to diverge.

8 eggs
some cream
some red onion, thinly sliced
half a dozen med/lrg mushrooms, thinly sliced
1 head of brocolli, chopped
half pound of peppered bacon
Parmesan cheese to taste, grated

Start by frying the bacon until just crisp. Drain and crumble. By starting with the bacon, you have lovely bacon drippings to use in frying the rest. Saute the the onion. Add the mushrooms, then the broccoli. Cook until they’re just soft. Beat the eggs & cream, season with salt and pepper and pour over the vegetable mixture. Mix in the cheese and bacon. cook over low heat until the egg is set.

At this point, I hear you’re supposed to switch to the oven to finish the dish. Not having made a frittata before, I wasn’t aware of that (I was just winging it), and actually got the thing flipped into another skillet to cook the top, then flipped back onto a plate to serve. Very adept flipmanship, if I do say so. Here it is:

Remember that mozzarella roll we made for the dinner party?

It was like a jellyroll of cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, and basil. It struck us that it would make the perfect filling for a paninni. So I picked up some nice bread, sliced up the roll, and laid it out between slices of bread and grilled it to perfection.

Why was this idea so great? Because when you usually make paninni, the filling is layered. The cheese melts but doesn’t always/usually bind everything together. With the roll, the various bits of filling are more or less evenly distributed. Most significantly the cheese is everywhere. Omnipresent cheese … mmmmm.

Anyway, it turned out very well. Ya, I know, this is the internet … pic or it didn’t happen. So here you are:

We recently had our February dinner party. This time we went with an Italian theme as mentioned in a previous post.

Things played out pretty much as planned. The only real change was that a few people had to bail so we ended up with 6 including me and Suzanne.

While we finished cooking the pasta, there was antipasti for people to nibble on. Top to bottom: sun-dried tomatoes, anchovies, grilled eggplant, artichoke hearts, and roasted red peppers.

We also had a selection of Italian cheeses.

The final bit of antipasti was a mozzarella roll. Suzanne got the cheese at the Fancy Food Show (possibly NSFW if you work somewhere uptight). It was a sheet of mozzarella rolled up into a cylinder. The idea is to unroll it, put stuff on it and roll it up again. Like a jelly roll or sticky buns. Suzanne filled it wirh sundried tomatoes and fresh basil. Neither of us are quite sure how we felt about the result. I later found a great way to put it to optimum use. That’s for a latter post.

Then there was the pasta. We cooked up some dried faro linguini that @daksis had given me to try. Very nice flavor and texture. Also I made (from scratch) a ricotta gnocchi. For sauces we had a basil pesto and an “almost” puttanesca (leaving out the anchovies as one guest was vegetarian).

Then there was dessert! Suzanne made an incredibly good Ligurian lemon cake with raspberries, and I made tiramisu from the recipe in The Silver Spoon (also see this, which includes the tiramisu recipe) which I recently added to my cookbook collection (at the suggestion of @daksis).

Throw in lots of wine and plenty of coffee, and we had a very pleasant evening.

We were looking around in the fridge tonight for something for dinner when Suzanne pulled out a big bag of mushrooms I’d picked up last time I was at Wholefoods. It was a lot of mushrooms. “I could make Cream of Mushroom Soup,” she said. “Yes, please!” I responded.

She started with this recipe from epicurious.com:

Ingrediants

2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
3 leeks, halved, thinly sliced (white and pale green parts only)
2 pounds button mushrooms, sliced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup long-grain white rice
3 1/4 cups (or more) canned low-salt chicken broth
3 1/4 cups canned beef broth
1/2 cup whipping cream

1/4 cup chopped fresh chives

Preparation

Melt butter in heavy large pot over medium heat. Add leeks and sauté until tender, about 5 minutes. Increase heat to medium-high. Add mushrooms and sauté until mushrooms are soft and dry, about 10 minutes. Add garlic; sauté 1 minute. Stir in rice. Add 3 1/4 cups chicken broth and beef broth to pot. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer until rice is very tender, about 30 minutes. Cool slightly. Working in batches, puree soup in blender until smooth. Return soup to pot. Stir in cream. Thin with more chicken broth, if desired. (Soup can be made 1 day ahead. Cool slightly, cover and refrigerate. Bring to simmer before serving.)

Ladle soup into 8 bowls. Sprinkle with chives and serve.

Some tweaks were made, largely because she was working with what was around the kitchen.

• 1 leek and some onions instead of 3 leeks
• brown rice instead of white, putting it in earlier
• 4 cups beef broth, and 3 cups vegetable broth
• and of course, using a stick/immersion blender (if you don’t have one … get one

Suzanne and I went out for dinner tonight. We’d heard people say that Aslam’s Rasoi.

When we peeked in we saw that it was busy but not full. Good sign. So we went in. We were shown to a cozy corner table … so cozy that we were almost blocked in by the surrounding tables later on. There was a feeling of trying to pack a few too many diners into the dining room.

The menu was reasonable, both in terms of variety and price, with the usual selection of North Indian dishes.

We got started with drinks and Assorted Pakoras (Vegetable Pakoras, Gobi Pakoras and Began Pakoras). The pakoras were nicely done. Whether it was Aslam’s practice, or specifically as we were there as a couple, I don’t know, but the selection of pakora were paired, two of each type. A nice touch in my opinion.

For the meal we ordered Lamb Vindaloo (Lamb curry cooked with potatoes and herbs in a hot curry sauce), Bengan Bartha (Freshly roasted eggplant sauteed with chopped onion, garlic, ginger, and spices), Chana Masala (Garbanzo beans cooked with onions, fresh tomatoes, and spices North Indian style, Aloo Gobi (Cauliflower and potatoes cooked with a hint of garlic and spices), rice, and Naan.

Serving sizes were good, providing a sumptuous meal and leftovers for another.

I’m not the world’s greatest lamb fan (yet) but I enjoyed the vindaloo. Tender and tasty with a nice level of heat. The bartha was ok … a little bland maybe. I would have liked it a bit more of a smoky flavor. The chana was very nice; good flavor and quite spicy. The aloo gobi was as expected, not exceptional, but certainly not a disappointment. The naan was quite nice, soft, with a touch of char.

Our waitress left a little to be desired, seeming to be somewhat ill at ease. Also, I didn’t think we were getting quite as much attention as we should have.

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Sorry, no pics… my bad.

Tonight I cooked dinner for the first time in the new kitchen. Sure, I make brunch a couple times… but that’s not quite the same.

Fingerling potatoes, chopped into bite sized pieces. Tossed in a baking dish with olive oil, salt, pepper, coarsely chopped smashed garlic, and fresh rosemary. Roast them in a 400F oven, tossing occasionally, until they are lightly browned and creamy soft.

Brocolli, chunked up and stems peeled and sliced. Saute in butter with a touch of salt and pepper. Add the juice of a lemon near the end and reduce it.

Add a couple nice pieces of filet mignon, pour some red wine, and enjoy.

That’s what we had tonight. And it was good.

Our produce box this week contained beets, so Suzanne made Roasted Beet Salad with Beet Greens and Feta.

One change was that she tossed the greens into the salad rather than putting then somewhat on the side. With the tossing the feta was coated in the bright pink beet juice… so it goes with beets.

There’s not too much to be said: garlicky, tangy, but most of all: beety! The feta was a nice salty counterpoint.

If you like beets (and btw I love beets and maybe not so coincidentally, Jitterbug Perfume is one of my favorite books), this is well worth a try.

Doing a post every day on this blog is taking up too much time that I need for other things, so I’m going to cut back to once or twice a week, at least for a while.

After the LARubyConf wrapped up this evening, a large group of us headed over to Gordon Biersch for dinner.

For beer I had the Schwarzbier (Literally “black beer” in German. Schwarzbier has a fairly light body with a delicious dry, roasted coffee like finish.). Dark, smooth, and tasty.

I started off with the “Old Fashioned Chopped Salad” (Chopped salad with chicken, pepperoni, pepper jack cheese, onions, tomatoes and a variety of fresh vegetables, tossed in an Olive Lemon Vinaigrette). This was good, down to the artichoke hearts and olives, big cubes of cheese. Yummy.

For main course I gave their Beer Battered Fish & Chips a try.

OK, I didn’t think to take a pic until well into it. My first impression was “Oh Fish sticks.”. First impressions were misleading as the fish turned out to be quite good. Happily it came with malt vinegar by default. It also, however, came with garlic fries. Um… WTF?! Fish & chips with garlic fries? Really strong garlic fries. While they were tasty enough, they definitely were not mean to go with fish & chips. Bad call Gordon Biersch.

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