The Flavor Bible: More Delicious than the Actual Bible!

Imagine this: you have a fridge and pantry full of food, a garden full of herbs, a rumbling stomach, and no idea what to make for dinner.  You rummage through your potential ingredients, racking your brain for something to cook, but inspiration doesn't strike.  Enter The Flavor Bible.  A quick flip through the book, and with some basic cooking techniques, a beautiful, harmonious dinner is just a few minutes away.

Unlike most cook books, The Flavor Bible doesn't actually include any recipes.  Rather, it consists of an alphabetized list of ingredients, followed by other ingredients that match well with the main ingredient.  The lists are based on feedback from hundreds of professional chefs, and the resulting answers are displayed based on the number of people who voiced the same opinion.

For example, if you look up hazelnuts, you'll find that CHOCOLATE and VANILLA are the most-referenced good pairings (as indicated by the uppercase letters).  Less-popular but also mentioned favorites include items like coffee, figs, and honey (as indicated by the bold letters).  The rest of the list is made up of ingredients that fewer people mentioned, like kiwi, cinnamon, and beets. But heck, looking over the options, you might just toss together a beet salad with toasted hazelnuts and a honey-cinnamon vinaigrette. Yes, please!

Although some pairings are quite obvious (who needs a book to know that Lobster and Butter taste good together?), many of them are more surprising, and we can almost always find some of the recommended ingredients around our house.  For instance, halibut and rosemary?  We wouldn't have thought of it, but it was delicious (pan-seared the fish and used rosemary to scent it while the fish cooked).

Additionally, the book lists several ingredients that go well together in the 'Flavor Affinities' lists.  For instance, if you look up pineapple, you'll see things like "pineapple + avocado + watercress" or "pineapple + rum + vanilla + walnuts."

The last aspect that we love is that for a handful of ingredients, they actually quote chefs or list restaurant dishes from some of our favorite culinary geniuses.  Everybody from Thierry Rautureau (chef/owner of Rover's in Seattle, and recent Top Chef Masters competitor) to Charlie Trotter to Hubert Keller to Eric Ripert weigh in on dishes that they serve, or share other interesting tidbits about various ingredients that they love.

The thing that we like most about the book is that it provides inspiration for dishes, rather than recipes.  It still enables the cook to be the creative force in the kitchen, but it provides them with some direction or suggestions for them to use.  In our house, it's become a go-to every time we have some basic ingredients and are looking to add some pizazz or otherwise push a dish over the top. The biggest testament we can give this book is that we've given it as a gift to  folks we know and love on more than one occasion, who have in turn bought it as a gift for their friends, on more than one occasion. Highly recommended, especially if you just want some general direction for a dish or ingredient as opposed to a step-by-step instruction manual.

P.T.I.Y.F. Holiday Edition: Easter

As far as the major food holidays go, Easter doesn’t usually come to mind the way others do (looking at you Thanksgiving!). We think it’s high time Easter was moved up in the ranks. This time of year many fresh fruits and veggies are just coming into season, and they fit in really well with traditional Easter themes of spring and rebirth. Plus, we’re always looking for an excuse to make a giant ham and gorge ourselves on chocolate eggs. This Easter, we had our friend and partner in crime, John, over for a low-key dinner. True to form, made way too much food for three people. Oh well, more ham for everyone!

Deviled Eggs with Crispy Bacon

Deviled eggs have always been a go-to appetizer for us, and a great way to get rid of the pastel boiled eggs that were hidden all over the yard. Allie has been hooked since she was little, as the creamy, tangy treats often made appearances at her parents’ parties. What, you ask, could make deviled eggs even better? The same thing that makes everything better! Bacon! Kudos are due to Uncle Steve, we absolutely stole the idea of adding crispy crumbled bacon to these little devils from him. He brought the same thing to last year’s Patriots tailgate. It adds a great crunch to contrast with the silky filling. Highly recommended.

Ham, Beautiful Ham

A good quality ham is clutch to any Easter feast…er. (Sorry, had to do it.) Sub-par ham with way too much fat, soaked in salt water, with a pouch of neon mystery glaze just won’t cut it. In our opinion you just can’t beat a Honey Baked Ham. However, we don’t have $90 to blow on any part of a pig (Editor’s note: those are Allie’s words. Ben could be convinced), so we went with a simple and delicious Hempler’s at a much more reasonable $30. No fancy cooking tricks here, we just baked it and served it sliced with a choice of Dijon or brown mustard for dipping.

Fresh Peas with Mint Compound Butter

We saw English peas in their pods at our local market, and had to try them. We hadn’t really seen peas in non-box or can form before, and it turns out the minimal effort of shelling fresh peas is really worth it, with a sweet grassy note that you don’t find elsewhere. Ben mixed up mint from our herb garden with softened butter in the food processor, and we used that to quickly sauté the fresh peas.

Pommes Anna

We had asked John to bring a starchy side dish, knowing he could be fully trusted not to show up with a box of instant mashed potatoes. He went above and beyond anyone’s reasonable expectations, and made pommes anna, a masterpiece of wafer thin potato slices, drenched in clarified butter, seasoned lightly with salt and pepper, and layered into a skillet. While baking, the potatoes crisp on the top and bottom layers, leaving the middle soft and delicate. When they were done, John flipped the contents out of the skillet onto the plate, revealing a lovely potato tart. Of course by the time we were done with it, it looked like it had been ravaged by wolves, but it sure was pretty while it lasted.

Homemade Crusty Bread

Our entire last blog post was about this exact recipe, so we won’t re-hash it in any detail here. The bread was still easy, still tasty, and still made the house smell awesome.

Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble with Strawberry Basil Ice Cream

Normally, we don’t consider desserts our strong point, so we were very happy and slightly surprised that we pulled this off. The crumble (recipe below, off of the Smitten Kitchen blog) had the classic sweet/tart combination of a strawberry rhubarb filling and a topping that was somehow soft and crunchy at the same time. The lemon zest in the topping gives it so much flavor, it was tempting to eat it alone. We topped the crumble with a homemade Strawberry Basil ice cream (which we whipped up with our ice cream attachment for the Kitchen Aid mixed), and it added a nice earthy creaminess to the tart filling. Honestly, though, any ice cream would be great.

STRAWBERRY RHUBARB CRUMBLE
Yields 6 to 8 servings.

Ingredients
For the topping:

• 1 1/3 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 3 tablespoons Demerara sugar (or turbinado sugar aka Sugar in the Raw)
• We used granulated sugar here as well and it turned out fine
• Zest of one lemon
• 1/4 pound (1 stick or 4 ounces) unsalted butter, melted

For the filling:

• 1 1/2 cups rhubarb, chopped into 1-inch pieces
• 1 quart strawberries plus a few extras, hulled, quartered
• Juice of one lemon
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3 to 4 tablespoons cornstarch
• Pinch of salt

Directions

1. Heat oven to 375°F. Prepare topping: In a mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, sugars and lemon zest and add the melted butter. Mix until small and large clumps form. Refrigerate until needed.
2. Prepare filling: Toss rhubarb, strawberries, lemon juice, sugar, cornstarch and a pinch of salt in a 9-inch deep-dish pie plate. (I used an oval dish this time, because they fit better in the bottom of a shopping bag.)
3. Remove topping from refrigerator and cover fruit thickly and evenly with topping. Place pie plate on a (foil-lined, if you really want to think ahead) baking sheet, and bake until crumble topping is golden brown in places and fruit is bubbling beneath, about 40 to 50 minutes.

Pssst... Knead some Dough?

We have always found the idea of baking anything from scratch to be a daunting prospect. And making our own homemade bread? That sounded like the food equivalent of building our own house from the ground up. No freaking way. But then, we discovered a very well kept secret in the food world; baking your own crusty, warm, delicious bread is not only do-able, it’s easy! We promise!!! And you don’t need an expensive and bulky bread-making machine (which I’ve always thought makes bread that comes out slightly strange anyway). All you need is a little time, a Dutch oven and a stand mixer. If you have all of these things, you are doing yourself a serious disservice by not trying this.

Ever since were discovered the ease and deliciousness of making homemade bread, we both agree that it’s one of the greatest things since, well, sliced bread. In fact, after being initially inspired by Michael Ruhlman’s recipe in Ratio (which he admits he stole from the NYT), we’ve made a loaf every week or so. The beauty of the recipe is that it’s simple (only requires minimal hands-on work), cheap (about a buck and a half for the ingredients), adaptable (you can throw anything into the dough that you want), and it fills the house with that amazing fresh bread smell.

HOMEMADE DUTCH OVEN BOULE
Ingredients

• 20 ounces flour
• 12 ounces water (warm)
• 2 t kosher salt
• 1 t yeast (either instant or active dry, but the latter will need to be activated)
• Olive Oil
• Sea Salt (or more kosher salt)

Directions

1. Weigh out the flour directly into your mixing bowl (ideally into a KitchenAid bowl).
2. Add the salt, then gently pour the water on top, so as not to combine the flour and water too much.
3. Sprinkle the yeast on top of the water, and allow it to activate for around 10 minutes.

4. Once the yeast is activated (and smells nice and bread-like), use the KitchenAid dough hook and knead the dough on the lowest setting for 10-15 minutes. We’ve found that with the 20 ounces of flour, the dough tends to be too sticky and will get stuck on the dough hook, so we typically keep adding flour (slowly, about a teaspoon at a time) until the mixer kneads it consistently. You know that you’ve kneaded the dough enough when you can roll up a small ball then gently stretch it into a transparent layer without it tearing.

5. After kneading, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it rest in a warm place for an hour. During that time, it will rise to about twice its original volume.

6. After the initial rise, knead the dough for a few minutes on a floured surface, and then cover with a dish towel for a short (15 minute) secondary rise.

7. Pre-heat the oven to 450 to ensure that it’s plenty hot when it’s time to actually cook the bread.
8. After the secondary rise, spread some olive oil into the bottom of a Dutch oven (tee hee), then put the dough in to proof (fancy word for “sit”) for an hour.
9. After the dough has proofed, spread on a small amount of olive oil and sea salt, then cut an ‘X’ into the top.

10. Cover the Dutch oven with the lid and put into the oven (we’ve had the best luck putting it into the highest rack possible… otherwise the bottom can burn a little) for 30 minutes.

11. After 30 minutes, remove the lid and return to the oven for another 10-20 minutes, or until the internal temperature of the bread reaches 200 to 210 degrees.

12. Let the bread cool, and then enjoy it! Feel free to have fun with making savory breads (adding different fresh herbs , chopped olives, and/or roasted garlic) or with sweet breads (adding fruit and seeds or nuts).

The bread makes great sandwiches and killer toast, but our favorite is eating it warm with some olive oil and salt. Honestly, this will impress your most hard-core foodie friends, and civilians alike. But don’t let it get out how easy this is, and if you do, you never heard it from us…