Squashed potatoes

. . . or as Cooks Illustrated calls them, “Smashed Potatoes.”

These came out great and were really very easy to put together. Buy a bunch of little potatoes, 1.5 inch to 2 inches diameter. They recommend the little red ones but I bought the little yellow ones. Two per person should be more than adequate as a side dish.

Preheat your oven to 500 F. Yes, 500 F. These potatoes are forged in hell.

Line a cookie sheet with foil. Add the potatoes and about 1/3 cup water. Cover with foil and crimp the edges. Pop it in the oven for about 30 min, or until a knife easily pierces your largest potato. For my potatoes (which were more like 2.5 inches diameter), it took 40 min.

Remove the foil and carefully flip your potatoes — they’ll have begun to brown on the bottom. Coat all over with olive oil (a paint brush helps). Smash each potato with something heavy. Cooks Illustrated recommends using another cookie sheet to smush down the potatoes all at once; I used my 4 cup Pyrex measuring cup.

Now slather onto each potato even more olive oil. Add salt, pepper, and a pinch of thyme to each potato.

Pop back into the oven until everything looks good and crispy. Cooks Illustrated did 15 min on the top rack, 20 min on the bottom rack, but this seemed like overkill. I took mine out after the initial 15 min on the top rack and they were wonderful — crispy on the outside and bottom, tender on the inside.

Yummy!

And aren’t you proud of me? I found a YouTube video featuring live maggots in some poor soul’s nose, but I posted this recipe instead.

D.

Shrimp cakes

I think I done good tonight. As usual, I skimmed a bunch of recipes on the web and decided to combine the ideas that seemed most appealing. This recipe which uses cooked sweet potato as a base tempted me, but I opted for something more traditional. But not too traditional: many recipes call for a cup or more of mayonnaise, which has always struck me as a calorie-overkill innovation. Hey, these things are unhealthy enough as it is — why add another several hundred calories?

Here’s what I did:

1 pound of raw shrimp, peeled
1 heaping tablespoon each of jalapeno pepper, red bell pepper, and yellow onion, diced fine
2 green onions, diced
1 large clove of garlic, sliced
1 heaping tablespoon of celery, diced fine
1 egg
1 chipotle chili, diced fine
2 cups of Panko bread crumbs, divided
Salt to taste
Lemon slices
olive oil and butter

Saute the garlic, onion, bell pepper, and jalapeno until tender. Let this cool a bit. Next, put the peeled shrimp into the work bowl of a food processor and add the sauteed vegies, 1 cup of Panko, 1 egg, however much salt and pepper you like (pepper being very optional, thanks to the chipotle chili and jalapeno), and the chipotle chili. Run the processor until you have a nice paste, then add the celery and process until incorporated.

Shape into patties 2 to 3 inches across and about 1/2 to 3/4 inches high. Bread with Panko. Heat up some butter and olive oil in a nonstick skillet and fry those patties on both sides until golden brown. Serve with lemon slices.

I made a nice mushroom risotto with this. Does anyone need risotto lessons? When I have the time to prepare it, risotto is well worth the extra effort.

D.

Fried pizza!

I’ve been enjoying Jamie Oliver’s new cookbook, Jamie at Home, and I give it two thumbs up, especially if you’re a gardener. It’s a beautiful cookbook with lots of full page color pix and page after page of tips on how to grow the difficult stuff, like asparagus or mushrooms.

The pizza dough and subsequent preparation were the easy steps. Jamie’s “quickest tomato sauce” was the real bitch, because I don’t enjoy pushing tomatoes through a sieve (and cleaning the sieve afterward wasn’t much fun, either). This recipe produces an intensely tomatoey sauce, though, almost like straight tomato paste, but tastier of course. I’m sure you could substitute the pizza sauce of your choice, but for the record, here’s my scaled-down version of Jamie’s recipe.

olive oil
about a dozen leaves of fresh basil
one 28 ounce can of stewed tomatoes
salt and ground black pepper
3 cloves of garlic, peeled

In a non-stick frying pan, add some olive oil and then the garlic, thinly sliced. When the garlic begins to turn color, add the tomatoes, basil, salt and pepper. When it comes to a boil, strain the sauce through a sieve into a bowl, and press the tomatoes through the sieve using the back of a wooden spoon. Be sure to scrape the “tomato mush” off the far side of the sieve. Return the sieved mixture back to the frying pan and cook it down until you have something that looks about right for pizza sauce.

For the pizza dough, I cut Jamie’s recipe in half and came up with the following. He calls for “strong white bread flour” whatever that is, and mixes it with some semolina, but I used bread flour and it worked just fine.

3.5 cups of flour
1/2 tablespoon of salt (he calls for sea salt)
1/2 tablespoon, heaping, of yeast
1/2 tablespoon brown sugar (he calls for raw sugar, whatever that is)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1.25 cups lukewarm water

Jamie gives a rather tedious recipe for working the liquids into the flour. I threw everything into my Kitchenaid with the dough hook and I let her rip. A few minutes later, I had a nice dough ball. I put it into an oiled bowl, flipped it over to oil it all around, and covered with plastic wrap. Popped it into the garage which in Bakersfield is always a warm place for letting your dough raise. Gave it a good hour for the yeast to do its thing.

I should note that I do indeed have sea salt, so I put my half tablespoon into my spice grinder, which lately has been used to grind fennel seed. Nice flavor addition to pizza dough, in my opinion.

The rest of this is easy as can be. Divide the dough into six balls, roll each one out on a floured board to about a six-inch diameter, and fry each one 30-60 sec per side until a bit golden. I used a combination of butter and olive oil. Top with tomato sauce and other goodies, and finish under a hot hot broiler.

I used tomato sauce, caramelized onions, prosciutto, fresh basil, and mozzarella cheese. Jamie’s recipe calls for buffalo mozzarella, halved cherry tomatoes, fresh basil and some dried oregano. Obviously you can do whatever you like for the toppings.

These were big enough that one for each of us was a pretty full meal, and I have three leftover mini-pizzas (just the rolled-out dough) that I’ll fry up tonight to accompany my dinner (chicken seekh kebabs). I wish I had more leftover caramelized onions,as then I could make a sort of onion kulcha with my leftover dough.

Enjoy!

D.