stacey . smoore . the staceyfish . 
Life in a Northern Town: the exploits of an ecstatic Alaskan
Lens: the adventures of a girl and her camera
Lasagna - there is so much to love about it. It's cheesy, it's gooey, it's a meal in itself, it's comfort food. It's easy to make to boot. This was something I could make in my dorm kitchen, following the recipe on the back of the Barilla box. What that recipe lacked in finesse it made up for in cheese. Not that we minded - we were college students starved for a homemade meal, and so we always had fun popping this into the ovens in the dorm kitchens, opening a bottle of wine, and making a meal such that we were the envy of most dorm residents.
Now that I'm out of college though, that cheese-laden flavor-lacking thoroughly Americanized version isn't going to cut it anymore. And that Souffer stuff? Forgetaboutit. Why oh why would you buy something like that when lasagna is like the easiest thing to make ever??? Anyway, I'd been looking for a good recipe for a several years until this winter when we had a dinner party at my swim coach's house and my friend Ginger brought a tray of the most fantastic lasagna. It had just the right amount of cheese and wasn't greasy and had some substantial herbs to it, which is really something that most recipes lack. So what did I do? I asked her for the recipe, of course.
"Oooh, I don't know, I'll have to ask my mom about it!" Apparently the lasagna recipe is akin to a state secret - Ginger's mom worked really hard to develop the recipe (it shows!) and only gave it to her daughters under the condition that they would keep it as proprietary information. Lucky for me though, Carol agreed that it was ok for Ginger to give me the recipe because I had shared my family's pumpkin cookie with her. Totally a great swap, if you ask me. And in case you're wondering, yes, I do have permission to share this recipe on this blog! I've modified it only a little bit, because the core premise of the recipe is so solid. It uses cottage cheese instead of ricotta, which I think is a really great idea because it's really tough to find good ricottas in the States. I absolutely love the sauce that you make for the recipe, and it's fantastic with both either and turkey Italian sausages. I did substitute dried Italian herbs for dried basil because basil's flavor is so volatile in the presence of heat and the dried version retains so little of the fresh's flavor - but I just added in the fresh basil later in the recipe. The overall effect of the recipe is a way-less heavy version of the typical lasagna, but still retains all of the flavor that you want.
Thank you so much, Carol, for sharing this recipe with me! You did an awesome job creating this lasagna and I really appreciate being let in on the secret!
"Ugh! I hate Italian pizza! It's so gross! It's not even Italian, it was invented in New York! Let me eat the pizza at Boston's, it's so good!"
Wait for it....
KA-BLAMMO!
Yep. That was my head exploding.
It exploded not for just one, but three very good reasons.
1. Hating Italian pizza is impossible. The ingredients are so fresh and the results so simple that it's quite simply easier to divide by zero than to hate it.
2. I'm not a food anthropologist, but I'm gonna call shenanigans on pizza originating in New York. The research I've done shows that it in fact came from Naples. It's funny how a place can do such great things (invent pizza) and such monumentally stupid things (like stop collecting all the garbage so it piles up to third story windows). But I digress.
3. Boston's pizza (god, I feel dirty typing in that URL for that link) is disgusting. You all know that I get pissed about paying good money for bad food, and not much makes me angrier than having to go there and pay the bill. In fact, the first time I ever went there (my bosses love it so we go there all the time for working lunches, much to my chagrin) I was sitting across from someone who had just read a few of my thoughts on restaurants and he could tell on the look on my face that I was livid about paying seventeen bucks for a shitty meal that I could have made one hundred and twenty times better by just lifting a finger and giving a shit about the food I was preparing. Anyway, their pizza is even worse than that first meal - a salmon caesar salad - that I had: the cheese was laid on way too thick and rubbery as only really bad American-made mozzarella can be, the crust suffered from being stuffed with ten times as much yeast as it needed to rise which made it utterly bland and sour, and the basil - this was supposedly pizza Margherita - was DRIED. DRIED, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???
*steps aside to breathe for a moment.... long deep breaths....*
Ok, I apologize for that "Oh FUDGE!" moment there. I just get sent into spasms of anger when I think about that place. Let's get back to my happy place, and for me right now, that happy place is homemade pizza, even if, no matter how hard you try, it's not quite like the Italians make it.
For some reason I don't make pizza as much as I should. There's really no reason not to - I have a wealth of dough recipes whose prep times vary from 24 hours to 90 minutes. My pantry is always stocked with the requisite ingredients for the crust and toppings. I even have two 8-inch pizza stones, perfect for a cozy binge-free pizza night. But for some reason, I just... don't.
Well, I had been craving good pizza for a couple of weeks and last Friday it because wholly apparent that that night was the night. The stars were aligned - the grocery stores were hemorrhaging fresh (FRESH! Not DRIED!) basil, I had plenty of fresh mozzarella in my fridge, and I had made a batch of marinara the night before. All I had to do was find a dough recipe.
So I called up my Mom. When I talk to him on the weekends, it's not uncommon for my Dad to give me a rundown of the pizza my Mom made the previous Friday and for him to gush about how her pizza gets better every single week. No dice on the recipe from the Mom front though - she was really busy with some elderly relatives, no big deal, it's not like she's the sole source of pizza dough ever (though I still want her recipe!). So at one point, needing to get my current events fix, I brought up NPR and lo and behold, on their rotating blurbs about featured stories, was a Kitchen Window ad, whose topic just so happened to be pizza. It was like the skies had parted and I was sitting in my own little personal ray of sunlight. I was fated to make pizza that night. The gods had willed it to be so.
So when I got home, I got to work on my pizza. After the dough was done rising, I attempted to get the dough nice and thin, but the thing about kneading is that it make dough very elastic. Every time I stretched out the dough it just shrank right back up. I eventually adopted the mannerisms of a, well, special Italian, trying to toss this tiny disc of dough up into the air, catch it on one finger, and let gravity do the work. It certainly worked better than countertop stretching, but clearly, my method needs work if I am to continue to aspire to Italian-standard thinness.
Thicker-crust-than-desired aside, this pizza was marvelous! I loved the warm, garlicky, basily sweetness of the sauce, topped with just a bit of mozzarella a plenty of fresh torn basil, all atop a crispy, grain-flavored crust. That pizza was not long for this world, and though I expect that it would have made a mean cold pizza breakfast, it never got the opportunity to prove itself. But even though I loved the process, the experience, and the taste so much, I think the best thing that came out of it was the inspiration to try again with a myriad of toppings. That's one of the best things about pizza - almost anything is a choice candidate to grace your pie, so you're only limited by your imagination.
And if you still think the pizza from Boston's is better than this, well, do us both a favor and don't ever talk to me about food. Unless, of course, you like watching my head explode.
Click here for the recipe for "Pizza Margherita, take due" »
Muffins get a bad rap, and none more so than bran muffins. See, regular muffins are sugar-and-oil fests, full of empty calories, and most bran muffins are healthy but, well, made of twigs. Can there be a happy medium between these two extremes?
Of course there can be! Enter my breakfast-on-the-go juggernaut, the 150% whole grain banana nut muffin! Now, you may be asking yourself how the hell something can be 150% whole grain, and here's your answer: grains are made up of the germ, the bran, and the endosperm. White flour and other processed grains get poo-pooed (and deservedly so) because the nutritious and tasty germ and bran are removed, leaving behind the starchy endosperm which, while semantically being a complex carbohydrate, is treated by your body just like sugar, a simple carbohydrate. While most muffins are made of only white flour, this recipe is made up of whole-wheat flour (germ, bran, endosperm), oats (again, germ, bran, endosperm), wheat germ, and oat bran. Lots of good-parts-of-the-grain yumminess, see?
An astute reader like yourself may have picked up on the fact that while a couple of those ingredients are the fiber- and nutrient-rich parts of the grain, they do not in fact contain all three parts. So I guess it's not technically whole-grain, but really, when you're only removing the bad stuff and keeping the good stuff it's easy to see that it has way more of the good stuff than the bad stuff, so it's like an endosperm with twice the bran and twice the germ, and hence, 150% whole grain! Don't argue with me on this one, I majored in math and I'll come up with some convoluted argument to prove that It Is So.
So that's enough science geekery, let's stop talking nutrition and start talking yumminess!
This recipe is awesome because it manages to be low-fat without tasting overly low-fat. Yes, when you bite into these muffins you can tell that they are healthy and nutritious, but they are still wonderfully moist and flavorful. That's because applesauce, oil's favorite understudy, has gotten its chance to shine in this recipe, and when it teams up with the bananas you get a moist, remarkably un-twig-like consistency. When you add in things like toasted pecans, flax, raisins, and the grains, you get a complex flavor profile that keeps your tastebuds happy.
These are ideal for early-morning athletes and snooze-button-hitters since they are easy to take with you and eat, ensuring you get those morning calories your metabolism needs to function properly throughout the day. I always eat one on the way to swimming in the morning and if I think there's a chance I won't get to eat my daily oatmeal I always bring along a couple extra to tide me over until lunch. That's another benefit to this muffin's ingredients: in addition to being flavorful, they also keep you full for a long time. So what's not to love? Skip that chemical delight breakfast you were going to grab on your way out the door and eat one of these instead!
Click here for the recipe for "150% whole grain low-fat banana nut muffins" »
Tonight was Cooking Binge Night (bread, muffins, sandwich meat, chicken cacciatore, minestone soup, oatmeal...). I'm going to be starting a very unpleasant work week tomorrow night and will have zero time for cooking so I had to get it all done tonight.
Last night I was supposed to start a batch of bread and let it do its twenty-four hour thang. But sleepier heads prevailed and I went to bed without so much as pulling the yeast out of the fridge.
Y'know, it must be a pretty sweet life to be yeast. Just think about it: you're born, you go to sleep, then you get woken up with huge feast and you eat like crazy for a couple of hours, and then you die. Along the way, it's not only normal and accepted to, well, burp and fart, it's required.
Yep, those little critters have it pretty good. Don't let anyone tell you that being a single-celled organism is dull.
But I digress.
So I finally got around to starting the bread tonight. I had forgotten to put oatmeal or any other grain on so that was right out and needed to find a recipe make. I was tempted by my herbs de provence loaf but realized that the only blend I had on hand was the one with anise. Yuck. So I took a page from L'Aroma and settled on a rosemary loaf.
As I was kneading and shaping (and waiting) I was thinking about how I would post this (I know, I'm such a nerd). I was originally going to post it as a variation on the herbs de provence loaf, but....
See, the loaves came out of the oven, and they were exceptional. They rose impossibly high - so high that the bread was so light that I had to slice very carefully so I didn't smoosh it. And the flavor - I can't believe it, it's so delicious. The wheat brings out the best in the rosemary - even though I used a very heavy hand with the herb the flavor is well-rounded, delicate, and almost sweet. I never thought I'd say it, but I think my version is way better than L'Aroma's Pan Marino. Theirs is a white bread with sea salt sprinkled on top and I really think the rosemary needs something more than refined flour. Rosemary is a fantastic herb, but really, it's not that good on it own. It needs something to support its flavors. I've known that for a while, but I never would have guessed that whole wheat would be the perfect complement.
Click here for the recipe for "Whole wheat rosemary bread" »
Growing up, I never quite understood why chicken noodle soup was supposed to be such great comfort food. Then again, all I had had back then were Campbell's or otherwise canned versions, and frankly, I think it would be more comforting to be beaten up with a can of soup than it would be to eat that not-very-chickeny-really-freakin'-salty-and-gross stuff.
But then I remembered my Mom's famous turkey soup. It wasn't so different from a chicken noodle soup, yet it was infinitely tastier. Maybe there was hope for this much-maligned recipe after all...
I first tried my hand at a, well, decidedly modern take on the stuff that I found in the Mayo Clinic cookbook. It had a chicken stock and soy milk base with edamame in the soup, and well.... it was weird. I didn't like it. But then.... last winter I was just getting into making my own stock and had had wild success with using it as the base for soups - even with recipes I had panned when I had made them with commercial chicken broth (forgive me, for I knew not what I had done). So I got to thinking that maybe it was time to give chicken noodle soup another shot, and this time I was determined to give it a fair shot.
Disillusioned by my first disaster with the stuff, I swore off recipes and struck off on my own. Amazingly, I hit paydirt on my first try. I had stumbled upon the First Law of Soups (anything made with a homemade stock is guaranteed to not be bland, boring, or disgusting) and the Second Law of Soups (always cook your noodles or grains in the stock).
Unfortunately, stock tends to burn a hole in my freezer. I just can't keep the stuff on hand, I use it as soon as I make it. If I do happen to have some in there, I'm usually saving it for something specific. But tonight I found myself with quarts and quarts of it in my freezer, even above and beyond what I will need for my upcoming minestrone soup. I also just so happened to have the salvaged chicken from my last pot of stock handy, and I realized that once again, this soup's time had come. I mean, it's been a tough week. I could use some comfort food. Thankfully, I've finally found a way for this time-honored classic to actually be comforting.
Click here for the recipe for "Actually comforting chicken noodle soup" »
Imagine 100% whole grain bread bought from the grocery store: bland, bitter, gross.
Now, I'd like you to completely forget that.
Instead, I'd like you to imagine a bread that's fluffy, tender, mellow, rich, and complex.
That bread is also 100% whole grain. The difference? It's been made by hand with a secret ingredient -- cooked oatmeal. This bread is outstanding for all purposes but makes a singularly spectacular sandwich -- especially when paired with homemade roasted chicken, red leaf lettuce, and tomatoes.
As I write this, there are a couple of loaves rising in the kitchen. I practically start to salivate when I think about the utter sensory bliss that this bread will bring about. I often wonder why I bother making any other recipes at all -- this one is that good.
I first got trapped in this recipe's tractor beam one day while flipping through my favorite baking book, Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. Here's what the author has to say about this particular bread:
"When ... made with rolled oats, the bread is light and bright; it has a rich creamy flavor -- very subtle, but with great warmth... You get bread good for toast, good for any kind of sandwich. We consider this one of the best basic breads for everyday eating."
Hear, hear! They speak the truth -- this bread performs as advertised! Let me know if you need convincing... you may just end up with a loaf or two on your hands.
Click here for the recipe for "100% whole grain oatmeal bread" »
When I woke up this morning i was craving something yummy and delicious and different than my usual oatmeal. Pancakes were sounding pretty delicious, but despite my large collection of health food and whole grain cookbooks, I failed to find a recipe that met my criteria whole ingredients I already had in my pretty well-stocked pantry and fridge (curses on forgetting to buy milk last time I was at the market!) exactly what I was looking for. Then I remembered a recipe that I had discovered around last Thanksgiving.
I'm, well, a pumpkin fiend, and this recipe had some whole grains in it, so it was looking like a strong contender. And luckily, it called for soy milk (something I always keep on hand for oatmeal) instead of the from-cow variety. We have a winner!
Now might be a good time to expound on the flour I used. No, white whole wheat is not in any way related to the nutritionally devoid all-purpose flour or flour used to make white bread. It is an honest-to-god whole grain flour with all the bran and germ, but made with a different variety of wheat. Most flour comes from red wheat, which is a more strongly wheaty-tasting (and more bitter or sour to some tastebuds) flour when ground in its whole state. White whole-wheat flour is more mild and can be more readily substituted into baked goods. So when I was making these waffles in which I use a fairly heavy hand with the pumpkin pie spices, I wanted the pumpkin and the spice flavors to shine, not the wheat. Since I didn't want to sacrifice the nutrition, white whole wheat was the clear choice.
White whole wheat flour is a little more difficult to find but it is gaining in popularity since at least a few Americans want to use more healthy grains but aren't gaga over the way whole-wheat flour tastes. I use King Arthur Flour's variety, but Hodgson Mill and and Bob's Red Mill also produce it.
The flavor results of the flour substitution? Undetectable. This recipe definitely hits the spot.
Click here for the recipe for "Whole-grain pumpkin spice waffles with blueberry syrup" »
Who doesn't love biscotti? This Italian twice-baked crispy cookie is wonderful with a cup of espresso or an after-dinner cordial, but let's admit it: sometimes we get tired of the usual almond or lemon flavor.
Enter the humble cranberry and pistachio, the two secret ingredients that make the flavor much brighter and crunch more satisfying. I like this recipe so much that when
I recently learned my friend Jeremy was studying for his impending bar exam and I resolved to make him some yummy treats for a morale package. Cookies were a given, but what else to add? And it occurred to me: Jeremy is probably drinking lots of coffee right now, so biscotti were the logical choice to add to the list of goodies. Using this recipe was a no-brainer. I mean, we all love chocolate and I make a mean chocolate-almond biscotti, but I ended up eschewing this because Jeremy doesn't like almonds in cookies. Surely he has access to lots of great biscotti (he lives in Seattle!) so needed a departure from biscotti boredom.
He, it seems, agreed. They were the highest-rated of the three types of baked goods I sent him, and he called them "exceptional." The bonus? These are relatively healthy (for a cookie, at least), so feel free to indulge in an extra one or two the next time your nose is stuck in a book and your hand is cramping from all of the essays you're writing.
Click here for the recipe for "Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti" »
My love affair with pizza margherita can be traced back to my absolute smittenness with caprese salad. It's really not all that surprising -- you start with basic, fresh, delicious ingredients, then you put it on a pizza. What could go wrong????
I had made this pizza before about two years ago. The first time, Cory was my dining companion and instead of a tomato sauce base we used freshly made pesto and topped the pizza with tomato slices. Delicious, but I would recommend custom-making the sauce for the pizza and using a lighter hand with the oil, as it will mix with the fat in the mozzarella. While I loved it, it certainly wasn't truly authentic.
So, of course, when Cory and I went to Italy, one of the things I had to eat over there was the pizza margherita. We wasted no time on that count -- our first lunch in Florence was in a trattoria outside of the city's famous Mercato Centrale. Cory had a pizza topped with prosciutto and I, of course, indulged my tricolore tastebuds.
The pizza was unlike any I had ever had before. The crust was very, very thin but not cracker-crunchy and the sauce was, for lack of a better description, true tomato red. I thought it was pure, simple, and delicious, and Cory was known to say "the sauce is so fresh it still had seeds in it!" The pizzas we were served were probably a good 12 inches, but they were nowhere near as heavy as their American counterparts. Since we had had a typically light Italian breakfast and had been walking all day and climbed to the very very top of the duomo (the Santa Maria del Fiore) Cory polished his off easily. I packed my leftovers out and devoured them later that day.
Of course, upon returning to the States, I wanted to make it, but the whole-grain fiend in me wanted a whole wheat crust. I finally found a recipe for it, and of course wasted no time making it. Next time I make it I will probably try to lengthen the rising time (true Stacey fashion) and I will make my crust much much thinner, even if I have to discard some dough. And I will buy a pizza peel. Save yourself the anguish -- buy one too!
Click here for the recipe for "Pizza Margherita with a Whole Wheat Crust" »
Since I've discovered all of the wonderfully yummy things you can do with bread, making plain ol' whole wheat just seems so... blasé. You can add herbs or bulgar wheat or seeds or oats or hundreds of other things. So when I got back from my honeymoon I wanted to make something delicious, but since I was tired I didn't want it to be too taxing. I was looking for the ease that comes with familiarity with a recipe.
I first gravitated towards an herb bread I've made before. That particular recipe is labeled as a good soup bread because it will rise and bake and give you a wonderfully high-rising loaf in about the time it takes to make a pot of soup, but there was so much yeast in it (how else could you get such eye-pleasing results that quickly without it?) that it was very sour and not very yummy.
So, I'll admit it -- I took the basic whole wheat bread I've posted here and just added herbs to it. There is something special about it though -- this bread is the first I'd used the long-rise methods with. I was simply amazed with the results! Allow me to extoll the virtues of long-fermented bread once again:
The dough was a joy to work with. It was soft, supple, contained plenty of air to press out during deflating, rounding, and shaping, and shaped more easily than any loaf I've ever formed. It also filled out the loaf pan completely -- all the way to the corners -- something no yeast dough of mine has done before.
In short, this loaf defied my already raised expectations. I had looked forward to a loaf with superior flavor but stiff dough and a lackluster rise. Instead, I feel like I'm eating bread like it is supposed to be now -- light, airy, wholesome, with great texture, flavor, and shape. Consider me a long dough convert! (A note: my bread-baking methods have improved considerably since this picture was taken -- I now achieve oven spring with each loaf. Next time I bake it I'll post a new picture of the impossibly high-risen loaf.)
Click here for the recipe for "Whole wheat bread with herbs de provence" »
Bread baking has become a bit of an obsession of mine. As I mentioned in my writeup for The Herbed Bird, I started doing it around Thanksgiving when I got really, really tired of store-bought bread and realized that I could probably do a much better job myself.
Well, I turned out to be right. Since I had never kneaded before and didn't have anyone to show me how to do it, it took me a couple of months to really figure out what the heck I was doing. My first couple of loaves were, well, bricks, but they were much better tasting bricks than the stuff you buy from the grocery store! I probably wasn't doing myself any favors by skipping the refined flour either -- ask just about anyone who bakes bread and they'll tell you that whole wheat bread is much more difficult to make. I didn't care -- I was going to make delicious whole wheat bread and that was final.
I did see many improvements in my bread over time, as my mom came to visit and showed me how to knead, as I read more on the subject, and finally, as I bought the cookbook that taught me just about everything that matters about whole-grain bread baking, Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. The acquisition of my Kitchen Aid stand mixer might have something to do with it too. Once all that came together, I started making what I would consider very good bread.
About a month ago though, I started making what I would call outstanding bread. I credit this entirely to the low temperatures long-rise method outlined in the book mentioned above. By letting the dough ferment for 24 hours instead of the usual 3, you get incredibly light dough whose flavors have developed marvelously without any of that sour taste that is so often found in bread. Let me assure you that you do not need to stuff two teaspoons of yeast into your dough to get your loaf to rise! I also find it much easier to fit this rising-deflating pattern into my daily life. I can make bread any day of the week with this method because I do not need to block off six hours to attend to dough that must be deflated every hour or so. Another bonus: for reasons that I can't explain, the loaf is more nutritious and keeps longer than its rushed cousin.
So what are you waiting for??? Go make this loaf! I find it's perfect for anything from sandwiches to toast to eating with soup to dipping in olive oil. You (and anyone you bestow this magnificent loaf upon) can thank me later.
Growing up, while probably no different than most other American households, I was familiar with startlingly few grains. I knew of wheat, oats, rice, and.... that's about it. Since I've struck out of my parents' house own and have had a kitchen -- and some cookbooks! -- to call my own, I've been making a conscious effort to branch out.
This recipe is adapted from one of my favorite cookbooks. It's odd that it's one of my favorites, give that I'm usually somewhat dissatisfied with the way the recipes turn out. Luckily, the recipes are usually a good 70% solution and I find it very easy to take their recipes and solve dissatisfaction with a few simple -- and still healthy -- substitutions. The original recipe for this dish called for (perfectly revolting) mushrooms but still lacked a thing or two in terms of taste and color. So I varied the cooking method a little bit, added in some much needed flavor, and here is the result!
Click here for the recipe for "Quinoa Pilaf With Arugula and Sun-dried Tomatoes" »
I've always been a breakfast person. Not really in the way that many other Americans are, where they like lots of eggs and bacon and other really unhealthy and non-nutritious foods, but more in the way that I like to get something healthy in my tummy that will stick with me until my mid-morning snack. This is sufficiently different, versatile, receptive to substitutions, and, of course, yummy, to meet all of my needs. They do take longer to cook than their gloppy rolled cousin, so I cook a week's worth at a time and reheat as I need it. Nowadays it's impossible to open my fridge without finding a massive batch of these oats, just waiting for their turn to be consumed.
And just look at them! It's easy to see why!
Click here for the recipe for "Indulgent Irish oatmeal with berries" »