Finally taking a breath of air...

Well, my friends... the move is over. Ginny is (nearly) housebroken. My final papers are written, and I'm taking my first real breath of air since... well, you can check the date.

As you can see by the pictures, my kitchen is now ready for Accidental-Chef-style cooking! Actually, truth be told, it was ready a few weeks ago, but with all the school work I had to catch up on after the move, my posts would have been something like:

There once was an herbed lamb chop served with basil green beans and a snappy Spanish red.

The End.

And it'd be accompanied by a picture of stripped-clean lamb bones and an empty wine glass.

So I took a little haitus, and now, I'm back! So stay tuned in the weeks to come for summer cooking fun, including:

~Quick, last-minute food for entertaining that will make it seem you slaved for hours

~Simple desserts for one with whatever you've got lying around

~How to dress up a Wegman's gourmet pizza

~And of course, there will be lots of wine pairing, including tips for tricky summer foods, like sushi!

Stay tuned and stay cool - the summer is a-comin' in!

Fifth Post - On biting off a little more than one can chew by oneself...

Hello all,
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I thank everyone for the comments, and I'm looking forward to reading more... If you notice that I've taken a little break from posting for a week or so, it's due to the two biggest changes in my life...

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I've gotten a new puppy - Ginny (short for Ginger) is a 11-week old Maltese-Yorkie mix. She's my baby, full of energy, and in need of a little attention right now. She (and I) are staying with my parents for a few weeks so she can get 24/7 care and love while I'm at classes (she's already a big fan of her grandma and grandpa!). Once she gets older she'll be able to handle a little time alone, but right now... not so much. She's adorable, as evidenced by the photo!

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Second big change - a new place. It's the top-half of a turn-of-the-century house that needs a little more love, paint, and elbow-grease than I had initially expected, but it's going to be a dream when it's done. I've posted a pic of the kitchen in its current state - it's going to be completely repainted and we'll be installing shelving units to make it in to an Accidental Chef's cooking palace!

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And heres' where I want to take a moment to say: I thank God for the help and support from my loving family and devoted friends... seriously, I could not be making any of these big, exciting life changes if it weren't for them!

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The long and the short of it is that this poor culinary fan is going to be living off of takeout and Bartles & Jaymes for a little bit. Do watch for new posts soon, though!

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Yours in the love of good food and wine (and of the dream of cooking to come),

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AL

Fourth Post - Egg: Perfectly Poached, Paired with Parmesan and Parsley (and Premier of Pictoral Posts!)

First of all, give me a big gold star for alliteration.

Second of all, I'm slaving away at my midterm paper (if you're reading this, J. P. Guilford - CALL ME!) and my stomach is distracting me. I've miles to go before I can even think of dinner or of sleeping, for that matter, but I need a snack. I need brain food. I need - wait for it - AN EGG!

I love eating poached eggs because it gives you all the joy of an egg without the added guilt of butter and oil.

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They're pretty easy to make once you get the hang of it - but as I've learned with eggs: you MUST LISTEN TO THEM. This is one of those cases. Everything will be alright if you just do EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT.

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What you'll need:

1 egg

toast (you can figure that out)

shredded cheese

parsley

vinegar

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Start water boiling in a larger-than-you-would-think-necessary pot. Put a little salt in.

While water is heating, get out an egg and crack it into a prep bowl. Do this unless you're some kind of expert at cracking eggs and never pierce the yolk. You cannot poach an egg if the yolk's been pierced.

Pay the egg a compliment to make it cooperate later. Try "My, you look sunny today!"

While the water's heating, brew a pot of coffee. This is brain food, after all. No wine - wait for dinner to celebrate having written your paper.

Get out some shredded cheese. I like shredded parmesan.

Get out some parsley flakes, 'cause parsley pairs prettily with parmesan for pictures.

Once your water's boiling, put a piece of toast down. I like potato bread.

This is key: add a splash of vinegar to the water, then turn it down so it's lightly bubbling.

Next, start stirring the water around so that it forms a vortex.

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PAUSE

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The vortex is key. It's how the egg is going to cook evenly, effectively and prettily. Make a nice, solid vortex. No reason to hurry, here. Pretend you're in Potions class and Professor Snape is peering over your shoulder.

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UNPAUSE

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Softly dump the egg into the vortex.

Time it for EXACTLY 90 SECONDS.

That should be time for you to pour your coffee and put your piece of toast on a plate.

Remove the egg carefully with a slotted spoon. Rest the egg against the pot side for a moment to get the excess water off.

Set it on the toast and garnish with a sprinkle of parm and parsley.

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10 points for Gryffindor! Bon appetite! Back to the books!

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Yours in the love of food, and for this meal, organic Guatemalan coffee with sugar and a touch of heavy cream,

AL

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The blogger is not an experienced chef. She takes no responsibility for the quality of the meals prepared while following her advice. Use your own judgment regarding cooking times and proper food handling.

Third Post: Savory Steak

Ahh... Spring Break. I never was one for the whole Cancun party scene - honestly, I, as an academic, get my joy from having completely unoccupied days in which to study at my leisure, get ahead, and relax a little. And by relaxing, I mean cooking celebratory dinners. Tonight's dinner was purely experimental. From the wine choice to the seasoning, I just cooked with what the spirit moved me to cook with.

Tonight: Steak. I'm not a huge aficionado of red meat inasmuch as I seldom crave it like some people do. However, this afternoon as I walked past the Butcher Block at Wegmans (I swear, I am not affiliated with Wegmans, I'm just a really really big fan) I saw a petit sirloin that started jumping up and down and tapping on the glass as I passed by. When it finally held up a little sign saying "I'M DINNER!" I decided to buy it.

I love steak with mushrooms. To me, it's just blasphemous to not serve them together. Here's what you'll need if you want to make steak the way I just did:

One petit sirloin (mine was just under 1/3 lb.)
Baby bella mushrooms (I chose the pre-washed, pre-sliced variety, because I'd rather spend my free time getting one more article read)
Olive oil
Garlic
Terragon (or any other spices you're fond of)
Red wine
A veggie for your side (I grew up in a Meat-Starch-Veggie household, so I feel compelled to include this. I chose green beans with almonds)

Start toaster oven (or whatever steak-cooking apparatus you might have) preheating. I used a toaster oven set on 325 on broil 'cause, well, it's cheaper to heat then the actual broiler on my oven.
Start your olive oil heating up in a small sauce pan on the stove.
Crush two cloves of garlic in a small prep bowl.
Dump your mushrooms in the sauce pan and stir to evenly heat.
Pour some red wine over the mushrooms

PAUSE

As the saying goes, "I love to cook with wine - sometimes I even add it to the food." I really enjoy wine. I do not drink wine to get drunk. I do not drink wine because I'm posh (okay, well, maybe a little). I drink wine because honestly, I don't think there's any better companion for a good meal. Paired correctly, it can open up culinary doors that never existed with water, soda or juice. Any sommelier I've ever met has said the same thing: "After the second glass, you're no longer tasting or appreciating the wine - so why bother?" Being single and drinking wine by this philosophy, I sometimes have a bit of wine left in the bottle that is not suitable for drinking, but that still packs some flavor. Save this for cooking. While cooking wines are available, there's a certain depth that you can get by cooking with a good table wine.

For tonight's mushrooms and the steak marinade, I used the leftover wine that I talked about in last week's post - the Tempranillo from Berberana vineyards. It was starting to taste a little dry, and I didn't want to ruin my past memories by drinking it past its prime. For the actual meal accompaniment, I bought a bottle of Cab - more on that later.

UNPAUSE

So add a good amount of red wine to the mushrooms. Pepper them a bit.
Add about half of your crushed garlic to the mushrooms. Stir.
Reduce heat to very low.

Put a tiny bit of olive oil in with the crushed garlic in your prep bowl.
Pour in some red wine.
Add some terragon.
Mix around with a fork, and spoon it over the steak - for best results, make a little tin foil "boat" for your steak, which will allow the marinade to flow around the steak rather than away from it.
Place steak in heating apparatus.
I like my steak rare to medium rare, so I went five minutes on one side, and about eight on the other.
While the steak is cooking, add some terragon, salt, and additional pepper to taste to your mushrooms. I let them simmer with the heat turned down really low. I love the earthy smell of mushrooms cooking. I think the terragon compliments it, and the wine adds such a nice zip.
When you turn the steak half-way through, dump the rest of the marinade in your prep bowl over the steak.
Microwave or heat your veggie side dish: No wine or TV if you don't eat your veggies. Manda says.
Watch your steak so it doesn't get too done. Mind the mushrooms, too.
When it's all ready, serve it up.

I served tonight's dinner with a 2006 Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon from Haras Estate that I got as the last bottle in a reduced cart - I hope it's not because it's being discontinued from the store I go to, because I think it's a lovely Cab. It's rich and earthy, but with super bright berry overtones. It's tannic enough for the steak so that the whole meal is never too rich. It compliments the red wine that the food was cooked with. It becomes delightfully fruity in the face of the spices and garlic. In my opinion, a really terrific match.

Well, now it's time to clean up the dishes and settle in for the last half-hour of TV before bed! A great way to end the first day of Spring Break.

Yours in the love of good food and good wine and the beautiful friendship they share,
AL

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The blogger is not an experienced chef. She takes no responsibility for the quality of the meals prepared while following her advice. Use your own judgment regarding cooking times and proper food handling.

Second Post - Flavorful Pasta: Packs a punch like a meal

Hey! So tonight is one of those nights where I'd be really tempted to pour myself a bowl of cereal and chow down, but I'm low on milk, and I'd cry if I didn't have enough for my breakfast tomorrow. My quiet breakfasts of coffee, cereal and a good book are kind of my kick-start for my day. But I digress.

This is one of those meals that I save up for nights like these. It's a mock-alfredo that can be made with minimal effort.

Set water to boiling in a moderately sized pot. Sprinkle salt in the water if that's your thing. I'm German, so salt and butter are kinda like foodgroups for us.

While your water is heating up, get out the other things you'll need:
~1 cup pasta (any kind. Really. I like pasta primavera because it seems like it would have more nutrients in it than your average pasta, and because it's pretty. But that's just me.)
~Parmesan/Romano/Grated Cheese
~One egg
~Spices: I like oregano and basil
~Olive oil
~1 clove garlic

Any time left, wash your face, lay out your clothes for the next day, surf FaceBook, whatever.
When the water is rolling, dump in the pasta. Stir around, leave a wooden spoon in the pot with it so it won't boil over. This just works. Trust me. Now go back to YouTube or whatever you were doing. Kill time for 10 minutes, because that's how long the pasta will take. Peel your eyes off the latest puppy video every so often to stir your pasta so it doesn't stick.

After the pasta is done to the doneness you prefer, drain it (I like to drain the water directly into the bowl I'm going to serve it in. It heats the bowl for you. Just please don't burn yourself or break your dish with the temperature change. I warn, because I'm good at injuring myself during inocuous household tasks).

Stir in a bit of olive oil to keep it from congealing, and spice it up with oregano and basil. I love pulverizing the spices in my hands before putting them in. I think it makes them more aromatic.

PAUSE

About garlic. I recently discovered that garlic's spiciness varies based on how you cook it. Some of you might find this to be a duh-ism, but this is news to me, coming from a family that didn't cook much with garlic. I was recently at a Cuban restaurant in New San Juan, and we were served the most delicious garlic bread. It was extremely hot (as in spicey). I asked the waiter what the bread was seasoned with. "Ajo," I was told. "Y..." I prompted. "Ajo. Solamente ajo." Got it. Just garlic. Turns out, it was fairly raw garlic, which made the bread really hot. I experimented with garlic in this pasta to see if I could garner the same effect. It is so. If you want your garlic to spice up your pasta, wait and add it right at the very end. If you want it cooked some to sweeten it, mix it in with the oil as mentioned above.

UNPAUSE

So whether or not you've added garlic at this point is up to you, but let's move on to the egg, shall we? Put the pot back on the heat for a moment or so to get the oil hot. Take it off the heat, and crack the egg into the pasta. Directly in. Mix it around with your spoon a bit. Now, add copious amounts of cheese. It should mix with the egg and make a nice creamy sauce. If you want, put it back on the stove for a moment, stirring it around, savoring the aromas, letting it all meld.

Pour in the pre-heated bowl, and serve with a glass of wine. The nice thing about this recipe is that a lot of wines go beautifully with it.

I'm eating mine tonight with a Spanish shiraz-tempranillo (Berberana vineyards). After a blind-taste, I'd say this: The old-world earthiness comes through as velvety and rich. It has ripe strawberry undertones. It pairs well with the pasta, and heats up the spice of the garlic wonderfully. It's just tannic enough, also, to cut the richness of the faux-alfredo. The salt in the pasta (should you choose to add more, as I do) brings out the berry flavors of the wine. All in all, a happy pair.

And that, my friends, beats a bowl of cereal.

Yours in the love of relaxing with good food and wine in one's tummy,
AL

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The blogger is not an experienced chef. She takes no responsibility for the quality of the meals prepared while following her advice. Use your own judgment regarding cooking times and proper food handling.

First Post: Mediterranean Supper

So this is my first ever blog, and my first ever post, so I guess I could say I'm new at this. I don't think that a decade-plus of "lurking" makes me any kind of expert, but here goes.

I've decided to start a blog for anyone who is interested, and my topic is food and wine. I'm a novice, by the way - hence the name "Accidental Chef" - but I am taking both cooking and wine as a serious set of hobbies, ones that I can say I thoroughly enjoy researching and studying!

Up until about a year ago, I thought that gourmet cooking was a sort of witchcraft that took place over double boilers and open flames, with incantations muttered in French, and thoroughly secretive to the outside world.

Then I discovered my own magic spell. Repeat after me: GOOGLE.

Right. I take the viable ingredients in my fridge (as a 20-something singleton, that can vary greatly) and Google them. I see what other people have done with the ingredients, and then I "make it my own." And by that I mean substitute anything that I don't have on hand, and muddle up the methods, and basically create my own dish out of a semblance of order that some might call a recipe.

Take tonight for instance. It's nearing 11:00, I haven't had dinner yet, I'm two-thirds of the way though analysing Stevenson & Greenberg, and I decide that I need to use up the Wegman's cheese flight in my fridge. (For those of you who don't know, Wegmans offers a "Cheese Flight" of small servings of 3-4 cheeses for singletons with a taste for dairy to enjoy). I quickly learned (via Google) that goat cheese, red peppers, eggs and oregano can be combined. So I do the following:

Heat olive oil in a small pan.
Sprinkle oregano into oil.
Throw some sliced veggies (anything from a previous meal or take out would do) into the oil. I had sliced bell peppers and yellow squash on hand, so I started that sizzlin'.
In a bowl, beat three eggs with a little milk.
Pepper the veggies in the pan, 'cause that seems like a good thing to do
Assuming that you're a slow egg-beating-person, your veggies are sizzling merrily by now. Pour the egg mixture into the pan.
Let sizzle for a bit, then crumble Wegman's herbed goat cheese on top. Use as much as you like. Lick your fingers off when you're done.

~PAUSE~

Here's the thing. This was supposed to be a special dish that was like an omelet, minus the pesky flipping part. It was served on an ocean liner in the 1940s and was said to be rather glamourous. Here's where things went wrong.

Know this, brave reader: I have a history of miscommunicating with eggs. My over-easies tend to turn out over-violent. This was supposed to turn into a flat, sizzling, Mediterranean specialty. Mine turned into a perfect version of that, but with a frustratingly undercooking middle. So I attempted the pesky omlet flip. The whole thing split down the seam. So I decided that the eggs were attempting to communicate to me that they wanted to be scrambled, so I decided to listen.

~UNPAUSE~

Scramble the eggs. It's what they want.
Hack them up a bit in the pan. Savor the smell of the cheese, oregano and peppers.

When it looks like it's cooked (it is by now, trust me) transfer the whole thing into a bowl. Instead of a Mediterannean specialty served on a plate with a garnish of parsley, you have a bowl full of Mediterranean goodness.

I paired this meal with a glass of Catawba and Concord Rose (Vetter Vineyards makes Cracker Ridge Rose - I'm a long-time fan). It's what I had on hand, and I thought the salt from the goat cheese would complement it. It did. The herbs and salt brought out the fruity sweetness of the wine, making it jammy, but not cloyingly sweet. Think strawberry jam on toast, mopping up egg yolk.

All in all, it was a good dinner. Not the prettiest in terms of presentation, but hey - it sure was delicious. And it gave me the energy and motivation to decide to start this blog. Hope you enjoy it, and that the posts to come bring you culinary enjoyment.

Yours in the love of food and wine,
AL

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* The blogger is not an experienced chef. She takes no responsibility for the quality of the meals prepared while following her advice. Use your own judgment regarding cooking times and proper food handling.