Recent meal roundup:

Farro Minestrone with Brussels Sprouts, Butternut Squash, and Chestnuts with Buttermilk-Dill Rolls from the freezer. The soup was pretty good, though a little strange. I love the chewy texture of the farro (spelt) and the sweetness of the squash and chestnuts. Not bad!

Pasta alla Amatriciana with Fresh Egg Pasta, accompanied by a spinach salad with bosc pear, shallots, and blood orange-honey-mustard dressing (based on this recipe). My boss lent me her KitchenAid pasta maker attachment, and I was excited to make fresh pasta. Using the pasta maker was a little tough starting out, because the dough was too moist, and it all stuck together as it was extruded. After I added a little more flour, it was easier, though it still stuck together a little bit. When we had pasta alla amatriciana in Italy, it was served with bucatini (thick, hollow spaghetti). I figured maybe if I made long macaroni noodles, it would be similar. But it turned out to be too much pasta. Macaroni is short for a reason. The sauce was good though.

Lentil-Chestnut Soup with Multigrain Pancakes (to celebrate Pancake Day!) and roasted cauliflower. The soup was still good, and I really enjoyed the pancakes! The secret is using ground up muesli in place of some of the flour. They were sweet and nutty, and I am very happy to have some more pancakes waiting in our freezer for a rainy day. Yum!

Pork and Stir-Fried Vegetables with Spicy Asian Sauce with brown rice and Ginger-Garlic Broccoli. The stir-fry was pretty good, though not great. I liked the ginger and garlic flavors with the broccoli, but 10 minutes was way too long to cook it. Even though I stopped cooking it early, it was still kind of mushy. Maybe broccolini takes longer to cook than broccoli.

Fresh Egg Pasta (fettucine this time; much better) with Classic Bolognese Sauce and an arugula, fennel, and parmesan salad. Apparently ragus are in at the moment. Although it took 4 hours to cook, most of that was unattended stove time, and it tasted just like I'd expected it to. Cook's Illustrated comes through again. It was a good dinner.

And for dessert--Chocolate Pudding made with a mix of whole milk and 1% milk. I used a beautiful brick of Callebaut semisweet chocolate. I kind of just wanted to gnaw at the chocolate and forget the pudding, but I'm glad I didn't. It was gooood pudding. My only mistake was that I didn't cover it with plastic wrap because I like pudding skin. But the skin that formed wasn't very good. It wasn't as thin and uniform as Jello pudding skin. Oh well!

I made a batch of White Chili to take for lunch this week, along with some Chipotle Cornbread sprinkled with pepitas. It wasn't as good as regular chili, but at least it was healthy!

Our latest dinner was quite enjoyable--meatloaf sandwiches with homemade challah (similar to this recipe, but from The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook) and Barbecued Meatloaf with mayo, melted Bellwether Farms Carmody cheese, and caramelized onions; accompanied by a salad of fennel, red onions, parmesan, and Phat Beets, which sadly did not taste as good as I'd hoped. I liked the jar label though.

The meatloaf was fine (it generated a lot of liquids while it was cooking, but it was still pretty moist after draining); the challah was great, if I do say so myself. I'm sad we don't have any leftover for French toast. I'll have to make more sometime soon.

P.S. Music and Lyrics was better than Because I Said So. Perhaps I have earned back a little of my chick flick credibility with Patrick now.

We had our second Dutch baby face-off (sorry I insist on calling them Dutch babies instead of puff pancakes, Tracy!). We compared the 2-egg recipe (left) with the 4-egg recipe (right), and both of us liked the 2-egger better (but from the first face-off, I like 3 eggs even better than 2--I always have to make things difficult!).

Here's our final recipe (though I reserve the right to decide I like a different recipe even better sometime in the future). As Shuna says, Dutch babies are very forgiving, so play around with the recipe! Next I get to try using less ordinary ingredients, like almond extract and buckwheat flour! (But first a brief waffle excursion in preparation for an upcoming coworker ski trip)

Caitlin's Basic Dutch Baby Recipe
(makes 2 servings)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 c all-purpose flour
• 1 T white sugar
• 1/8 t salt
• pinch of cinnamon
• 2-3 extra-large eggs (2 for Patrick-style, 3 for Caitlin-style)
• 1/2 c milk (we use 1%)
• 1/8 t vanilla extract
• 1 T unsalted butter

1. Place shelf in the lower third of the oven. Preheat two 6-inch cast iron skillets at 425F (or double the recipe and use a 12-inch skillet).
2. Stir together dry ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon) in a medium bowl.
3. Whisk together wet ingredients (eggs, milk, vanilla) in a measuring cup.
4. Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and blend (I use a stick blender) until no dry pockets remain.
5. Split the butter between the preheated skillets, and let melt for ~1 minute in the oven. Swirl the skillets to distribute butter.
6. Pour half of the batter into each skillet and bake for 20-25 minutes. Watch through the oven door as the pancakes puff up majestically!
7. Remove skillets from oven, transfer pancakes to plates, and serve immediately, sprinkled with powdered sugar with lemon wedges on the side.

A good movie at our local independent theater (with frozen Junior Mints!) followed by a nutmeggy cup of custard and a tall glass of steamed milk at Cafe Borrone. It was a good Friday night.

We've been preparing for a ski trip we'll be going on in a few weeks with some coworkers of mine. Neither of us has ever been skiing or snowboarding, so this will be interesting. Patrick's in charge of researching snow sports, and I'm working on finding a good waffle recipe to make for a group breakfast during the trip.

This morning, I made two different Cook's Illustrated recipes--Best Buttermilk Waffles (on the left) and Yeasted Waffles (on the right), topped with a little maple syrup. Patrick squeezed us some orange juice (made with a blend of tangelos and blood oranges from our box).

I felt sure one of them would turn out to be the perfect waffle, but neither was quite right. The buttermilk waffles had the right texture, but they had too much baking soda--they had a funny salty chemical flavor. I doubled the recipe (to use up buttermilk, of course), so it's possible I shouldn't have doubled the amount of baking soda; I know leaveners sometimes don't scale the same as other ingredients. However, I think the blame at least partially rests with Cook's Illustrated; after the fact, I checked The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, and they had the exact same recipe, except using 1/4 of the baking soda listed in the original recipe. Too bad I didn't see that earlier! So it's possible their buttermilk waffle recipe would fit the bill if I used less baking soda. I'll have to give it another chance sometime.

The yeasted waffles were exciting to make (I love doughs that rise overnight in the fridge!) and turned out very light and crisp (some might even say they were ethereally light and crisp). There was nothing wrong with them, but I'm looking for a waffle that is denser and more filling. Also, I prefer a sweeter waffle. These certainly have their merits.

So neither of today's waffle candidates were winners (and now we have a freezer full of waffle leftovers; not a bad situation to be in). I'm going to try two more next weekend, and if all else fails, I have two recipes that I know are pretty good (Plain and Easy Breakfast Quickies and Honey-Yogurt Waffles, both from Dorie Greenspan's Waffles: From Morning to Midnight). While searching for waffle recipes, I was reminded of the totally awesome Belgian sugar waffle that Patrick had at Le Pain Quotidien a while ago. It looks like these waffles go by many names, frequently called Liege waffles. I found a few recipes online that look promising (1, 2, 3, 4). I'll have to try making them someday when we're going to go on a long bike ride after breakfast, to work off all the butter and sugar.

Late last week, Patrick prepared dinner at my request: Apricot and Lamb Tagine, whole wheat couscous with pine nuts and scallions, and Roasted Cauliflower. The tagine was easy to make (slow cooker!), but the lamb turned out kind of dry. Also, I'm not sure if I actually like lamb. The apricot part of the dish was nice though, as were the couscous and cauliflower (I like the Cook's Illustrated approach of cutting the head of cauliflower into eighths instead of into little florets).

Last night, I made my third and final fresh pasta dish with the borrowed KitchenAid pasta maker attachment: Shrimp Fra Diavolo with homemade thick spaghetti (using the same Fresh Egg Pasta recipe as before), accompanied by Orange-Glazed Acorn Squash and steamed broccoli.

Of the three pasta shapes I tried, the spaghetti was the most tedious to make, because I had to separate each and every strand as it came out of the extruder plate. It was good, but not worth the work, in my estimation. Patrick took care of the sauce (including the flambeeing), which turned out very well. The shrimp was perfect--firm and slightly sweet. The squash was yummy, as before.

We watched Patriot Games tonight, and afterward we decided to keep up our Jack Ryan streak by watching our copy of Clear and Present Danger. Sadly, when we opened it, the DVD was missing (the security sticker on the side had been slit). We bought it at Borders a while back, and apparently somebody stole the DVD out of it and put it back on the shelf. That sucks. Sadly, we have no other Harrison Ford DVDs (we need to get the Indiana Jones trilogy one of these days, even though Temple of Doom kind of sucks), so we had to make do with Ocean's Eleven instead.

I went a little crazy two weekends ago and decided it was finally time to buy a (very) nice Dutch oven. I didn't have a very good excuse for it, though it will be good to replace the peeling non-stick Dutch ovens from our grad school days. Plus I wanted to make a pot roast, which required a large-ish oven-safe pot. Anyway, Patrick was cool with it, so I went on down to Williams-Sonoma and bought a 7 1/4 qt. red Le Creuset Dutch (French) oven. Oh, it is so beautiful! And it is, as expected, a joy to use.

I used it to make Classic Pot Roast, accompanied by Potato and Cheese Biscuits, baked in our cast iron skillet. Our beautiful new pot got pretty dirty, but it cleaned up pretty easily with some Bar Keeper's Friend and some elbow grease, courtesy of Patrick.

It was a fine dinner (considering that both recipes were "light," I'd even say it was a good dinner). I used my scalloped biscuit cutters for the biscuits, but the dough was pretty wimpy, and they kind of oozed into each other. Still tasty though!

Later that week, after the pot roast leftovers had been exhausted, we had a meal similar to this one, but not quite as good: Pan-Seared Salmon, Multigrain Pilaf with Sunflower Seeds, and Braised Fennel with Orange.

The fennel wasn't nearly as good as the Moosewood recipe linked to above, and the salmon wasn't quite as good as last time (maybe because I used coho salmon instead of wild salmon). I liked the pilaf a lot though. The flavor was good, and the sunflower seeds added a nice muted crunchiness. My only complaint was that the overall pilaf texture was kind of mushy and creamy. I like it better when pilaf grains are distinct from each other and retain a little more bite. I would definitely make this recipe again though.

To celebrate Patrick's birthday, I made yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting (using the Cook's Illustrated recipe, as usual) this weekend. My frosting job didn't turn out quite as pretty as before, but they still tasted good.

We conducted our second round of waffle tasting this past weekend (round 1). This time we tried Cinnamon-Raisin Whole-Wheat Waffles (on the left, from Waffles: From Morning to Midnight) and Multigrain Waffles (on the right, using the Cook's Illustrated Multigrain Pancake recipe from a few weeks ago, but doubling the amount of butter and beating the whites of the eggs until moderately stiff and folding them in at the end).

Both turned out well. The cinnamon-raisin waffles were enjoyable, but not amazing. The multigrain waffles were great. I think I like them in pancake form a little better, but the waffles had the same sweet, nutty flavor and slightly crunchy texture as the pancakes. Yum! I'll definitely be making the multigrain waffles this weekend, along with a few other recipes, still to be determined.

It's a good thing waffles freeze well!

In unrelated news, the weather has been beautiful recently (sunny and mid-seventies, compared to overcast and mid-fifties in Portland--we kept checking the weather forecast for the two cities this weekend, trying to convince ourselves that we could handle the change), and our poppies are all blooming. They make me happy.