bringing the cooking class home, day two

What do you do when you realize that you accidentally planned two separate birthday/dinner parties on different nights instead of one big one? First, pretend to be slightly annoying that you have to cook again and have no plan in place, but then, get excited because you can just try a bunch of new recipes and won’t be forced to eat the leftovers for the whole next week! SCORE! See, I was originally planning for only one party for my mother’s birthday this year but then I realized some guests had been invited over one night and some over another night (thanks dad) so I had to get a plan together, and fast. Luckily I was armed with AW so she was able to rescue me.

After the massive Asian feast the night before, I wanted to make another favorite food type of my mother’s – Italian, and wouldn’t you have it, AW is a bit of a pro the Italian food space. Here is the menu I derived, with which I felt for once I was truly going to test how large in fact my stomach was.

-Squid (Calamari) w/ homemade Aioli
-Tomato Flatbread/Focaccia
-Spinach Lasagna


Squid (Calamari) w/ homemade Aioli

First mistake: do not go specialty food shopping at 7pm on a Friday because chances are people are starting to close up for the evening and have sold out of most of their fresh items. I had the (not so) bright idea of going to yoga before food shopping, so I ended up rolling into to this particular store around 7pm only to find they have very little options left for squid: frozen and uncleaned. Frozen was out of the question for me, so I kept hearing the words of a close friend repeat over and over again in my head: “whatever you do, don’t get un-cleaned squid; it is a mess, and disaster to work with”. Shit. As I was awkwardly deliberating about the purchase in front of the seafood counter, secretly hoping that the fish mongers would somehow stumble on some cleaned squid in the backroom, a lovely gentlemen struck up a conversation with me and we talked about my fears of cleaning squid (this means removing all the guts and insides etc). He walked me through the process and told me it was not too bad. Once I had thoroughly annoyed the fish monger behind the counter and there was no hope for that secret stash, somehow I found my confidence inspired by my new friend and made the purchase. And can you guess how much I paid for 10 whole squids? $2.50. Win.
Turns out, cleaning a squid is not as gross and disastrous as my friend warned me (whose reaction to my enjoyment of cleaning squid was: “Whaaaaat?! You have too much time on your hands.” Which is probably true…). Nonetheless, this is how I would recommend cleaning squid:

First, get some nice kitchen shears, rinse all of the squid, put in the bottom of your sink and have a gut-bag ready for the scraps. Grab the squid right in-line with the eyes (see pic to left) and cutoff the tentacles in one cut, keeping the tentacles in one piece. Once removed you should see a small black V-shaped thing still connected to the side with the eyes- this is the beak of squid. (This is how the animal eats! Cool, right?) Next, you need to remove the body. Take a strong hold of the top portion of the body with the eyes and while slowly twisting the remainder of the body cavity with the other hand, you should be able to pull out the insiders of the squid. (I can email a picture of squid guts to those that are interested.) They should come out easily if you do not tug and just simply twist. If you are too rough and rowdy with these delicate creatures, you might just rupture the ink sack, and then you will be in big trouble!

You want to make sure the remaining piece has no guts left, so I would also recommend snipping off a section at the tail and making sure water can easily run through the remaining body cavity. Next you will need to remove the feather-like bone that is still holding the body together. At end where it was closest to the eyes, there should be a point where you can bend back the skin a bit and grab the bone/cartlidge to pull out carefully. It literally looks like a feather…

Now all you need to do is slice the body cavities into rings and decide how you want to prepare the squid. Because I had never made this before, I wanted to be a bit more traditional and make a fried calamari appetizer, unlike what AW suggests. (I promise Alice, I will make grilled calamari soon!)
We breaded it lightly in just some breadcrumbs and Italian seasoning. My mother made the exceptionally brilliant decision to use the outdoor burner on the BBQ, which I would suggest, because frying this stuff can be a mess (and the hot oil can hurt!). I used canola oil and made sure the oil was super hot before putting anything in. The rings really only need to be in the oil for a few minutes, or until lightly brown, with the tentacle pieces taking longer than the rings.

We served the hot calamari with fresh Aioli from AW (pg. 47). I used my new mortar and pestle to grind up 3 cloves of garlic with a dash of sea salt until it is somewhat like a paste. Then separated 1 egg yolk and added that and ½ teaspoon of water to the garlic-paste. Mixed that well with a whisk. Then slowly added 1 cup of olive oil, whisking constantly. As the egg yolk absorbs the oil, the sauce will thicken and turn a light yellow color. I think I was whisking for about ten minutes, or until thick.
I would recommend using a mortar and pestle here if you have one, over using a food processor because a food processor has a tendency to make garlic very bitter. (I heard a chef say it once; it’s something about the chemistry properties of metal vs. garlic, clearly not my specialty, but bitter often happens). Also, there are a TON of variations you can do here with the addition of herbs or roasting juices of meat or seafood into the finished aioli. I think next time I will add some finely minced basil to my finished aioli.

Total Prep/Cooking Time for Squid & Aioli: 15 min for the aioli + 15 min squid prep + 10 min cook = 40 min total
Total Cost: $5-$7

Tomato Flatbread/Focaccia

I finally got this recipe right, though I overcooked it slightly (see slightly more brown Focaccia picture below). See, I tried to make it for my friend last week, but a) I screwed up bubbly yeast mixture by over mixing it and b) I missed a step further down in the recipe where you needed to set the Focaccia aside AGAIN for ANOTHER 2 hours. Oops. Sometimes, well, most of the time I am an impossibly impatient person so when I realized I had messed up, the whole elaborate flatbread I was planning on serving as a lovely appetizer just ended up being an extra pizza, in addition the pizza I had already made for dinner. A bit of a letdown, but my friend was a good sport about it and told me it was delicious regardless. You need these people in your life. I’m serious, I am all for people being direct and really honest about their feelings, but I swear I would have given up cooking had people truly told me what they thought of a certain dish. Coming to mind right now was that time I decided to make empanadas for the first time. It happened that I measured the flour and sugar wrong so the shitake mushrooms were instead surrounded by a sugar cookie. I found this depressing, but my lovely friends laughed at first but still ate them and even took a few home for lunch the next day…. that’s what I call good friends. :) Anyway, I warn you that this one takes a bit of a scheduling commitment, but really too not much of your actual time in the kitchen. Most of time is spent either mixing a few basic things together or letting the dough rise. Because baking is MUCH more a science than cooking, here are the more detailed steps:

1. Stir together 2 teaspoons of dry yeast & ½ c lukewarm water
2. Add & mix well (but not too well) with ¼ c unbleached white flour & ¼ c. rye flour (found in most natural food stores). Allow this mixture to sit for about 30 minutes or until quite bubbly.
3. In a separate bowl mix together 3 & ¼ c of unbleached white flour and 1 teaspoon of salt
4. Stir the flour mixture into the yeast with ¾ c. cold water and ¼ c. olive oil
5. I put all this into my electric mixer for about 5 minutes, or until soft and elastic. You can also knead by hand on a floured surface.
6. Put the dough into a large bowl, cover with a towel (preferably not saran wrap) and let sit for 2 hours. You can also let it rise overnight in the refrigerator.
7. Once dough is ready (or 2 hours or overnight has passed), generously oil a 10 x 15.5 inch rimmed baking sheet.

8. Gently remove the room temperature dough from bowl and flatten on the sheet. Try to even out the height of the dough, but don’t rip it or be too crazy about it. Try not to deflate the air as you are shaping.
9. Dimple the surface with your fingertips and drizzle with 2 T. of olive oil.
10. Cover and let rinse for an ADDITIONAL 2 hours.
11. Preheat oven to 450 and if you have a baking stone put that in the olive for 30 minutes prior to putting the flat bread in.
12. Right before baking I put a few sliced fresh heirloom tomatoes, salt, pepper and some garlic powder.
13. Bake for 20-25 min and if you have a baking stone, put the pan directly on the baking stone. It should be lightly golden brown when you take the focaccia out.

Yum! This is a great little appetizer or lovely complement to a dish that has a lot of juice! There are lot of liberties here too that you can take by adding herbs to the dough with oil, or using other onions, greens etc to the flatbread before baking. The possibilities are really endless.

Total Prep/Cooking Time for Flatbread: 4.5 hours total
Total Cost: $10 (if that)

Spinach Lasagna

Because when Tracy made this a few weeks ago and it was so delicious, I wanted to try my hand at it and recreate it with my mother. (AW pg. 270). I won’t go through the entire process with you, because Tracy has already talked about it in detail, but I must say, this was delicious once again. We did make a few adjustments from the way Tracy prepared it (some I would not do again) but all-in-all a great learning experience to make 1) fresh pasta (see rolled out on left), 2)more tomato sauce and 3)béchamel sauce (which I think I could actually eat all by itself).

The main thing that we did differently was that instead of cooking the pasta before layering it in the dish, we did not cook beforehand and instead added extra tomato sauce to the layered (but not yet cooked) lasagna and simply cooked it for about 3x longer. It was much chewier than the butter-like pasta that Tracy made, but it was still quite good. I think it really just depends on personal taste and I think if I had to make it next time, I would cook the pasta before putting it in the pan. For me, it seems that if we are going to go to all of the trouble of making the pasta fresh, we should showcase it.

Of course, if anyone would like the full recipe, please let us know :)
Total Prep/Cooking Time for Spinach Lasagna: appx. 2.5 hours total
Total Cost: $35-40

Make it all again? Yes, everything! Enjoy :)