Lemon Roasted Chicken

Hello again! I'm back from another long hiatus.  In my defense, I've been quite busy lately. First of all, I GRADUATED (woowoowoo!).  Accordingly, I was kept busy with a lot of dinners, and parties, and dinner parties, and graduation parties, and let's-party-for-no-specific-reason parties, and somewhere in there I did a ton of work to ensure I actually graduated.  In addition, there was a little bedbug situation in my apartment (I <3 NYC...) that had to be dealt with.   So not much cooking has been done recently, in part because 99% of my belongings were trapped in giant plastic bags while my apartment was treated.  On a related note, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the general public for wearing the same three outfits repeatedly for the last two months. 

 

At any rate, I've finally moved out of the old apartment and will be spending the summer studying for the bar exam at my parents' house. This is horrible news for me but excellent news for this blog because I have never had such a strong motivation to procrastinate in my entire life. Also, my parents seem willing to accept home-cooked meals in lieu of rent, which fits perfectly into my (non-existent) budget.

I reverted to being vegetarian recently (my temporary dalliance with animal proteins died a sudden and painful death brought on by a late night viewing of Food, Inc.), but yesterday was my Dad's birthday and he's the sort of guy who believes if a meal doesn't have meat, it's not actually a meal.   (And if it doesn't have red meat, then it's a "healthy" meal.)  So I made an exception for him and made this lemon roasted chicken.  Since it met Dad's definition of "healthy," we were all able to eat copious amounts of birthday cake afterwards.  

The recipe calls for boneless chicken breasts with the skin still on, which I had to custom order from the butcher at our local grocery store, who somehow interpreted my request for "4 chicken breasts" as "the breasts of 4 chickens,"  meaning not days after deciding to be vegetarian I walked out of the grocery store with the single largest purchase of meat I have ever made in my entire life.  Lovely. But I'm told it was yummy. 

Lemon Roasted Chicken

 Adapted from the Barefoot Contessa

Ingredients:

• 4 chicken breasts, boneless, with skin
•  1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 small onion (the original recipe calls for 3 tbsp of minced garlic)
• 1/3 cup dry white wine
• zest of 2 lemons
• 2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1.5 tsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp minced fresh thyme leaves
•  kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 lemon

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mince the onion into small pieces.  Warm the olive oil in a small saucepan over medium-low heat.  Add onion (or garlic) and cook for a couple of minutes (do NOT let it brown).

Remove saucepan from heat and add wine, oregano, thyme, lemon zest, lemon juice, and 1 tsp. kosher salt.  Stir gently until combined.

 Pour the sauce into a 9 x 12 baking dish.  

 Place the chicken, skin side up, on top of the sauce.  Brush with olive oil and sprinkle generously with salt and freshly ground black pepper.  Cut the remaining lemon into wedges and stick the wedges in with the chicken. Place the baking dish in the oven and cook for 30-40 minutes until the chicken is done.  The skin should be nicely browned- if it is not, stick the pan under the broiler for a couple of minutes.

Raw chicken.  With skin.  Eeew.

 Remove from oven and cover tightly with aluminum foil for 10 minutes to seal in the juices.

 Serve with basmati rice or couscous, drizzled with the pan juices. 

Yum Scrum!

Bird's Nest Banana Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

Oh, hello again friends. If you celebrate Easter, what did you do today? Spend time with family? Enjoy the sunshine? Eat good food? Spend time in the sunshine with your amazing family while eating good food? That's what I did.

I also started the day off with obscene amounts of matzo brei because, hey, I have one parent who is Jewish and one who is Catholic and my taste buds don't discriminate. I swear I'm not eating again until Thanksgiving.

yummm

You know what else I did today? Spend absurd amounts of time playing Draw Something.

I had been under the impression that Words with Friends and Draw Something only worked on Iphones. False.  I mean, this is just way too much fun. Seriously. Too. Much. Fun. This article was never more timely.

Anywho, I did take some time off from finding creative ways to draw (among other things) a cyclops, a tomato, an apron, and vomit to share these Bird's Nest cupcakes with my family. The banana cupcake recipe is from Baked, while the buttercream and topping situation is courtesy of yours truly. These guys take a little while to prepare if you are doing everything from scratch but you can try to shorten the time needed by buying premade icing and pre-toasted coconut.

I must say, the cupcake recipe was fantastic, and the finished product is adorable. I will definitely be making these again.

Bird's Nest Banana Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

Ingredients:

• 2¾ cups all-purpose flour
• 1¼ teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ cup (4 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• ¼ cup vegetable shortening, at room temperature
• 1¾ cups granulated sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 1½ cups mashed very ripe bananas (about 4 bananas)
• ½ cup buttermilk
• 1 batch of chocolate buttercream frosting (see below)
• 1 bag of shredded coconut
• 1 bag of candy eggs

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Line two 12-cup cupcake pans with paper liners.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and set aside.

Beat the butter and shortening together until creamy. Add the sugar and vanilla and continue beating until fluffy. Add the eggs and beat until just combined. Add the bananas and beat until just combined. Then add the flour mixture, alternating with the buttermilk, in three additions, beginning and ending with the flour mixture.

Fill the cupcake tins about three-quarters full.

Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through the baking time, until a toothpick inserted in the center of a cupcake comes out clean. Transfer the pans to a wire rack and let cool for 20 minutes. Remove the cupcakes from the pans and place them on the rack to cool completely.

For the chocolate buttercream:

Mix 2 sticks of butter (room temperature), 1/2 cup of cocoa powder, 3 cups of powedered sugar, 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and 4 tablespoons of heavy cream or half and half until creamy and soft.

For the coconut:

Spread shredded coconut on a baking sheet and bake in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes, until browned. You may want to stir the coconut around once or twice during baking to make sure it browns evenly.

It will go from this:

To this:

Now, on to the decorating!

Spread each cupcake with icing.

Using your fingers, press coconut around the edge of the cupcake, leaving a space in the center clean. Place 2 or 3 candy eggs in the center.

So, so cute. And tasty. Success!

Passover Fresh Fruit Tart

Happy Pesach everybody!

About a week ago my bestie Ilene and I went to a "Passover Sides and Desserts" class at the Institute for Culinary Education here in NYC. We were both seeking inspiration for new dishes to bring to our respective Seders this year. During the 4+ hour class we made: chicken soup, herbed matzo balls, salmon gefilte fish, matzo polenta with mushrooms, Passover rolls, potato kugel, a chocolate torte, a strawberry hazelnut macaroon torte, and this lovely fresh fruit tart that I am sharing with you today.

Fresh fruit, tangy raspberry sauce, and an almost marzipan-ish cake... yum scrum

My original plan was to re-make it for my family's Seder on Friday, but the truth is the combination of a killer hangover (Thursday night was... uhm...epic) and a lack of faith in my ability to transport it safely up to Stamford, CT made that impossible. I did make it on Saturday though. And it was deeeelicious. It is kosher for Passover, but seriously its so good and so simple there's no need to limit it to those 8 days of the year. Besides, dessert is non-denominational.

Passover Fresh Fruit Tart

Ingredients for the Almond Cream Cake:

• 1 cup blanched almonds
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 stick butter, at room temperature
• pinch kosher salt

For the toppings:

• 10 oz frozen raspberries, thawed
• fresh fruit and berries (I used banana, orange, raspberries and strawberries- you can also use pears, apples, etc.
• 5 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1/4 cup apricot preserves

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease a 9 inch round cake pan and line with parchment paper; grease the parchment paper. Pulverize the almonds in a food processor, then add the sugar and process until combined. Add both eggs and process for one minute. Add the butter (cut into small pieces) and the salt and process for another minute (or until no chunks of butter are left). Place in the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes, until browned (in my experience this takes no longer than 20 minutes).


Cook in cake pan on wire rack for 20 minutes, then remove cake from pan and cool entirely.

In the meantime, wash and chop up your fruit. Berries and oranges can be placed directly in the refrigerator, while bananas/apples/pears should be tossed with 2 tablespoons of the lemon juice before they are put in the fridge to prevent browning.

Blend the thawed frozen raspberries in a blender until smooth, then strain the mixture to remove the seeds.


When the cake is fully cool, spoon the raspberry sauce over the cake (you may not need to use all of the sauce).


Arrange the fresh fruit on top.


In a small saucepan, melt the apricot preserves and 3 tablespoons lemon juice over low heat.


Using a pastry brush, gently brush the apricot preserves over the tart.



Serve with a little extra raspberry sauce for added flavor and prettyness.


Voila! Enjoy.

Moroccan Shakshouka

Hey there, y'all! I hope you enjoyed a fabulous and sunny St. Patrick's Day (I know I did, not least of all because I am now DONE with the MPRE aka future-lawyer-mandatory-ethics-exam).

I have some (slightly) exciting news: Torts & Tarts has now passed the 1000-views mark! So thanks to all of you for checking it out, and pinning to it on pinterest, and "liking" it on facebook, and all that good stuff.

When I looked at the "stats" tab just now, in addition to the number of pageviews I was able to see some basic data re: who has been checking out the blog. I learned:

• some not-surprising things (the Bailey's Cupcakes got more hits than the Healthy Egg Salad)
• some slightly surprising things (Torts & Tarts is huge in Ukraine. Like, it is BLOWING UP. It looks like the blog was linked to on a dating site. So uhm, привіт.)
• some VERY surprising things (some people found the site by Googling "torts and tarts porn movie"- whattt?)

Isn't the internet a wonderful place?

Moving on. I hope all of you (friends, family, single Ukranians and porn aficionados alike) enjoy today's recipe: Moroccan Pepper, Tomato, and Egg Stew aka Shakshouka.


I'm no arbiter of Moroccan authenticity, but I spent a chunk of time in Morocco before law school and the flavors of this stew took me right back to the Maghreb. I ate something very similar a couple of times in the South, where it is prepared in a tagine and called a "Berber omelette." Variations of the dish are served all over North Africa and the Middle East. The recipe calls for harissa, which I don't have, so I used a combination of hot sauce and sweet paprika along with ground cumin and turmeric to give the stew its color and flavor.

Moroccan Shakshouka
adapted from Olive Trees & Honey

The major ingedients in this simple stew are peppers, tomatoes, and eggs. You'll need 4 green bell peppers, as well as 1 1/4 lbs. (3 cups) of peeled, seeded, and chopped plum tomatoes. I absolutely massacred my tomatoes and ended up well short of 3 cups- next time I'll buy a few extra tomatoes as insurance.

You know what one of my favorite foods in the world is? Bell peppers. You know what one of my least favorite kitchen tasks is? Deseeding and deribbing bell peppers. C'est la vie.

Heat 3 tbs of olive oil in a large saucepan and add 1 large onion (chopped) and 1 or 2 cloves of garlic (minced).


Cook for approximately 5 minutes, until slightly translucent.


Add the peppers and cook for another 5 minutes or so, until the peppers are "crisp-tender"- until they have started to soften but just barely.


There are no pics with the tomatoes because seriously, I butchered them. It was a fight to the death, and despite having several large, sharp knives in my arsenal I lost. Badly. But take my word for it that after the peppers are crisp-tender you should add the tomatoes, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp ground cumin, 1/4 tsp turmeric, a dash of sweet paprika and a healthy pour of hot sauce (or harissa if you have it). Bring it all to a boil and then reduce heat to medium-low and cook for about 15 minutes, until the tomatoes are soft.

Using a spoon, create 4 indentations in the stew. One at a time, crack 4 eggs into a small bowl and then pour into the indentations. Cover the saucepan and cook until the egg whites have set but the yolks are still runny (the recipe says 5 minutes, but for me it took about 10-15).


I don't like runny yolks so I cooked the eggs almost all of the way through- you can shorten the cooking time if you are more of a sunny-side-up type

Serve immediately. To add some extra color and flavor put a drop of hot sauce on each egg and sprinkle each plate with some extra paprika.

The recipe serves 4-6 people as a side dish, and 2-3 people as a main course (although there might be some fighting over the last egg).

One or two eggs with a heap of veggies is the perfect serving size for a hungry guest!

I have to say, I absolutely loved this dish. Not only did it give my tastebuds a strong dose of nostalgia, it was delicious. The eggs were perfectly cooked- soft and tender as only poached eggs can be, but kicked up a notch with all the spices. The stew is low-carb and low-calorie and yet very hearty and filling. The amount of harissa/paprika/hot sauce can be adjusted to taste.

And its always nice to have yummy leftovers.

Crispy Parmesan Veggie Sticks

Sometimes planning what to cook feels like a futile exercise in free association. Making one thing leaves you with a lot of leftover ingredient A, so you buy ingredients B and C to make another dish, but then you're left with too much B, so you run out and get D, E, and F, but E is only sold in bulk so you hunt desperately for other things to do with it before it goes bad, and so on and so forth.

Its difficult to buy ingredients in the proper quantities when cooking just for yourself or for a few people- hence the plethora of random ingredients cluttering my cabinets and my refrigerator (flaxseed, anyone?). But lately I've been trying to use up the food I already have before running off to the store. Sometimes this is successful (like when I used the parsley and lentils left over from this meal to make this salad), and sometimes it's not (like when I was left with a boatload of dill after making this casserole and for the life of me couldn't think of anything to do with it. I think its still in the back of the fridge somewhere).

I'm doing well this week though, and to make this snack I scheduled another date with Panko breadcrumbs (evidently pronounced pahn-ko, not pain-ko, an embarrassing revelation I had when I asked for it at the grocery store last weekend) to create a healthy treat that has all the satisfying crunch of french fries but with a whole lot more vitamins and a whole lot less fat. These veggie sticks are great served with tomato sauce, aioli, or honey mustard. If you make them with seasoned breadcrumbs they might even be good all by their lonesome. I used asparagus and zucchini but I bet other vegetables would be good as well.

Crispy Parmesan Veggie Sticks
adapted from How Sweet Eats

Ingredients:

• Asparagus spears (the thinner the better)
• Zucchini, sliced into wedges
• 2 egg whites
• 1 cup panko breadcrumbs (seasoned or plain)
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1/4 cup ground or finely grated parmesan cheese
• Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Place a wire rack on top of a baking sheet and spray with cooking spray (if you don't have a wire rack, just the baking sheet is fine, but you will need to turn the sticks over halfway through the cooking time).

With the egg whites in one shallow bowl and the breadcrumbs, flour, parmesan, salt and pepper in another, dip the veggies first in the egg whites and then the breadcrumb mixture.

Unfortunately I could only find this thick asparagus, but thinner spears will be a whole lot crispier!

Arrange veggie sticks on top of the wire rack/baking sheet.

like modern art, no?

Place in the oven and cook for about 20 minutes, until the breadcrumbs turn golden brown. Remember to turn the sticks over once midway through cooking if you are not using a wire rack.


Yum scrum!

Sephardic Lentil Salad

Well, here I am. Back in NYC and back in the land of Olive Trees & Honey, a mysterious land where seemingly any dish can be deemed Jewish as long as any Jew ate it anywhere at any point in time. This "Sephardic" lentil salad is no exception- while many a Sephardi may have enjoyed it, something tells me the salad's appeal (and history) is a bit broader. This simple salad can be served warm or at room temperature and would be a great side dish for any entree with Mediterranean or North African flavors. Try serving it over rice or with some fresh hummus and warm pita.

Sephardic Lentil Salad (adapted from Olive Trees & Honey)

Ingredients:

• 1lb (about 2 1/4 cups) brown or green lentils
• 8 cups water
• 1 bay leaf

For dressing:

• 1/3 cup fresh lemon juice or red or white wine vinegar (or even a combination: I used half lemon juice, half red wine vinegar and it turned out well)
• 1/3 cup chopped fresh parsley or cilantro
• 2 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp ground black pepper
• 1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 2/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 red onion, chopped

In a large saucepan, bring the lentils, bay leaf, and water to a boil.


Cover, reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer until tender but not mushy (about 25 minutes). Drain and remove bay leaf.



Put the warm lentils in a large bowl. In a small bowl, combine the lemon juice/vinegar, parsley, salt, pepper, garlic, and cumin.

the usual suspects: a lineup of the dressing ingredients

Slowly whisk in the olive oil.


Drizzle over the lentils and stir gently to coat. Just before serving stir in the onion.



You can serve this salad plain, sprinkle it with feta cheese, or even make it into a dip by blending it in a food processor with 1 cup tahini and and an extra 2/3 cup of lemon juice and 1 1/2 cups of parsley.

You can also serve it in a bowl you made at a paint-your-own-pottery studio in college.