Burning Down the Kitchen

Super Simple Tomato Sauce

Lucas — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 22:58:57 +0000

This tomato sauce was a staple of my dorm life cooking. It’s incredibly simple, doesn’t require a ton of hands on work, and tastes fantastic. I made it at least once a week, and my friends are hooked. Even more, now that I’m home I still love to make it whenever I’m craving a quick pasta fix. Trust me, after just one bite nobody will know how easy it is to make!

Super Simple Tomato Sauce

INGREDIENTS

6 tablespoons good olive oil

5 cloves of fresh garlic, thinly sliced

1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

28-oz can of whole or crushed tomato (pref. San Marzano’s)

3 tablespoons unsalted butter

1/2 cup Parmesan + extra for serving

1 lb of pasta (Spaghetti-like shapes work best… I use bucatini)

Basil (for serving)

DIRECTIONS

Heat olive oil in a large skillet until it starts to shimmer over low-medium heat. Add the sliced garlic and crushed red pepper flakes and cook until garlic becomes either brown or translucent. Pour the can of tomatoes into the pan (be wary of splattering oil & water!!)Lower the heat to low and simmer the sauce until it thickens, approximately 20 to 30 minutes. If using whole tomatoes, crush the tomatoes when they soften with a potato masher. While the sauce is simmering, boil a pot of water and cook the pasta until it is al dente.

Once the pasta has cooked, drain it in a colander. Add the butter and Parmesan to the sauce and stir. Then add the pasta directly into the pan, and mix all together. Serve immediately, garnishing with extra Parmesan and basil leaves.

Sunny’s Sunny Side Up Breakfast Hash

Lucas — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:41:34 +0000

My sister and I made this almost immediately after seeing it on the Food Network’s Cooking for Real, by Sunny Anderson. It combined some of our favorite ingredients (chorizo, potatoes, garlic) in one of our favorite forms of breakfast delectibleness (hash). Also, it uses a bunch of ingredients we regularly have stashed in the pantry, which made it the perfect spontaneous breakfast dish for when we had a little extra time in the morning.

My sister and I altered the show’s recipe slightly, omitting the 1/2 pound of ground chuck for an additional 1/2 pound of chorizo, and removing the red pepper flakes as well since chorizo tends to already be spicy enough.

Sunny’s Sunny Side Up Breakfast Hash

Modified from Sunny Anderson’s Breakfast Skillet.

INGREDIENTS

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound fresh chorizo
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 medium red potatoes, diced small
1/2 large yellow onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary leaves
4 eggs
1/4 cup chopped parsley leaves

DIRECTIONS

Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a skillet set to medium heat. Add chorizo (and ground chuck, if using), breaking it up as it cooks. Season with salt and pepper. Add the potatoes, onion, and additional oil, if needed. Stir and let cook undisturbed for approximately 8 minutes, or until it forms a golden brown crust. Stir the potatoes, then cook undisturbed for another 8 minutes.

Once the potatoes are almost cooked through, stir in the garlic, rosemary, and red pepper flakes (if using ground chuck). Form four pockets to put the eggs in. Add oil to these pockets if necessary. Pour an egg into each pocket, cover the pan, and turn the heat to low. Cook until the eggs are set to desired doneness, approximately 2 minutes. Serve immediately, garnishing with parsley.

Dorm Room Cooking

Lucas — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 22:38:42 +0000

Cooking in a dorm room is a nearly impossible task. I’ve learned this during my last two semesters living in a dorm in New York City. While I was fortunate enough to get a suite with a kitchen, it’s really not a kitchen built for cooking. It has literally no counter space. It was probably designed for the typical consumption of canned soup and bags of ramen noodles rather than actually cooking something that didn’t come from a package.

Nonetheless, I’ve figured out how to make the most with the space I was(n’t) given. I’ve perfected the system of making pasta sauce in less than an hour, and breading and frying chicken without setting off the kitchen warden — our way-too-sensitive fire alarm that I’ve set off from the steam from boiling water. In mid-May I’ll be returning home, and hopefully have updates to provide for this website when I’m able to use a real kitchen again. In the meantime, I’ll be posting a backlog of recipes I’ve tested while on break in Los Angeles in January and March.

Photo Friday

Lucas — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:00:50 +0000

Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park, Washington

Madelines

Lucas — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:00:21 +0000

My sister really deserves most of the credit for this post. We were watching a movie where one of the characters made madeleines and ever since then they have been one of the things she’s really wanted to make. One day while we were out shopping for a perforated bread pan for French Bread loaves, we happened across a madeleine tray. Needless to say she bought it and the same day we were in the kitchen trying to make madeleines.

Before then, I had never had a madeleine. I’m not really a person for sweets, so they never caught my attention even though my friends would see them in coffee shops and comment on how good they were. I was missing out. Madeleines are really really good. They have my favorite ingredient – butter – and lots of it. And they are perfectly sweet.

The recipe my sister and I used was modified from Ina Garten’s Barefoot in Paris cookbook. The madeleines in the book call for coconut flakes, and were actually called Coconut Madeleines, but my sister and I both decided it would be better to try them plain first. We added lemon zest rather than coconut to brighten the flavor.

Madeleines

Modified from Ina Garten’s Cocunut Madeleines.

INGREDIENTS

1 1/2 tablespoons melted butter, to grease the pans, plus 1/4 pound (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
3 extra-large eggs, at room temperature
2/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
Zest of 1 lemon

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Thoroughly butter and flour the madeleine pans. This step is very important, don’t just use nonstick spray or you will tear the cookies.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the eggs, sugar, and vanilla on medium speed for 3 minutes, or until light yellow and fluffy. Add 1/4 pound of butter and mix. Sift together the flour, cornstarch, baking powder, and salt, and stir into the batter with a rubber spatula. Stir in lemon zest.

With a soup spoon, drop the batter into the pans, filling each shell almost full. Bake the madeleines for 10 to 12 minutes, until they spring back when pressed. Tap the madeleines out onto a baking pan lined with parchment paper and allow to cool.

SOURCE: Food Network

Photo Friday

Lucas — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:00:20 +0000

See what I did there?

How to REALLY Make French Fries

Lucas — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:00:59 +0000

French fries might just be the perfect snack food. They are so simple, yet can be incredibly satisfying when they have the perfect combination of crunchy, salty, and potatoey goodness. However, they’ve always been a food that I’ve always shied away from making at home. Deep fried french fries would come out incredibly starchy, while baked french fries would be dry and bland.

Then I saw this post on Serious Eats. With a large amount of clever trickery and culinary experimentation, the writers at Serious Eats figured out how to imitate the venerable McDonald’s french fry at home.

McDonald’s-style french fries that I could make at home? While McDonald’s may not be a gourmet food establishment of any sort, they do have delicious french fries. As the author of the Serious Eats article says, “At their best, they are everything a french fry should be: salty, crisp, light, and not greasy.” Not only that, but I could freeze these french fries for months and have them ready to be prepared whenever I want? I had 10 pounds of potatoes on my kitchen counter within the hour.

Rather than cutting up potatoes and tossing them right into the deep fryer, this recipe was a multi-step process. Instead, the potatoes were cut, blanched in a pot of boiling water with vinegar, deep fried, frozen, then deep fried one last time – a process similar to the one used by McDonald’s to cook their fries. And it works.

These really are the perfect french fries. I even froze a bag of them and made them into garlic fries a few days later by tossing them with butter, Parmesan cheese, and parsley after they were fried. My sister and I ate them too fast to take any pictures.

Want to make Perfect French Fries? You can find the recipe at Serious Eats.

PS: If you like to know the behind-the-scenes stuff about why cooking something one way over another is better, the article on how the McDonald’s recipe was deconstructed is a great way to know why you will be able to make perfect french fries with this recipe. LINK.

So… Yeah.

Lucas — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:38:18 +0000

As my zero readers have probably noticed, I published one post and then disappeared. Why? Well, among a multitude of reasons I moved across the country to New York City, where I am now attending college. I haven’t had many opportunities to cook here as I have been adjusting to a completely new life. Eventually I’ll figure out how to use my dorm’s incredibly small kitchen and resume posting, but for now I think I’ll stick with publishing a few recipes I made over the summer but never got around to putting on the blog. I’m still working out a schedule for posts, but right now I’m thinking of publishing one each week on Wednesday (my free day). We’ll see how it works out!

Lets Start with Ice Cream

Lucas — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 05:11:13 +0000

A few days ago, I was left wondering what I was going to do with the vast amount of time that I had to myself this summer. For once, I had no obligations, and no real worries over my summer break. This August, I’m off to college. Until then I have a summer where I can do almost anything I want. While this was an exiting prospect in previous months when I was toiling through a mountainous amount of senior year work, it now seems like I have more time than I know what to do with. So I decided to start a food blog.

My sister, Alissa, is joining me in my effort to catalog our weekly culinary adventures. From here on, my sister and I will be posting two entries each week of various things we have cooked throughout the week, starting with some Mint Chip Ice Cream.

The recipe we used to make the mint chip ice cream is from David Leibovitz’ blog, HERE. It was our first time making ice cream, and the recipe was easy to follow and the results were incredible. Perfect solution to a mint chip ice cream craving.