Rice-stuffed game hen

I love cooking Cornish game hens but once I start eating them, I remember how much work it is to disassemble such a small bird. A couple of nights ago, I tried another game hen recipe, this one from the Frugal Gourmet's original cookbook.

Frug called this "Game Hens with Lebanese Dressing." The dressing is really stuffing; "dressing" makes me think of salads. The recipe is written for four game hens; I cooked one hen and halved the stuffing ingredient amounts. First off, you saute half an onion (sliced) in a tablespoon of butter until the onion is just starting to brown. I discovered that my butter was all played out, so I used olive oil instead. Once the onion has browned, add half a cup of rice, a cup of water, some pine nuts (1/16 of a cup, if you really want to halve the recipe precisely), quarter of a teaspoon each of allspice and cinnamon, and salt to taste. As this cooks down (I let it go until most of the water was absorbed), it looks dirty from the spices, but I suppose it really shouldn't be called "dirty rice."

Anyway, once the stuffing is done, pack it into the cavities of two game hens (if you have one, like I did, you can just use the rest of the stuffing on the side). Set the oven to 325 F and cook for an hour. Frug recommends serving the hens split in half, but I didn't do that.

The stuffing flavor was rather subtle, but nice. The spices and pine nuts added sweetness but not in an excessive way. The chicken juices made their way into the rice as well. Most of the skin was done to a paper-like brittleness that was very chewy; I probably should have brushed the skin with something (honey would've been good, and would've fit with the other ingredients) to keep it a little more moist.

All in all, it was a little something different in terms of roasting a bird, and very simple.

Dithering quesadilla

I've been dithering about making quesadillas for a while. I pulled out How to Cook Everything and Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home and compared their quesadilla recipes. I dithered over the exact amounts of ingredients, the exact technique (use two tortillas or fold one over?). I thought about making them for breakfast, then was unable to motivate myself to get out of bed to chop the ingredients up.

The real problem was that I'd never made anything like quesadillas before, and I knew it was going to be a bloody mess in need of massive tinkering. Since I'm a perfectionist at heart, that was ample excuse to postpone quesadilla-making. Until today, that is. Today I made one for an afternoon snack.

I laid down one tortilla in an oiled skillet over medium heat. Then I added grated cheddar cheese, chopped onion, chopped button mushrooms and salsa. I topped the assemblage with another tortilla and toasted the quesadilla for two minutes. Then I flipped it and toasted it for three minutes. When it was done, I slid it onto a plate. I didn't follow Bittman's ingredients exactly, but I did follow his method of assembling the quesadilla.

Well, it was a revelation. Some of the filling squeezed out between the tortillas and the bottom one was a little soggy from the combination of the ingredients and the oil in the pan. I didn't care. It tasted terrific. When I finished it, I was sorry I hadn't made another, but of course I hadn't done that because, well, what if I didn't like it? It never fails.

I wouldn't call this authentic Mexican cuisine (not by a long shot) but I am glad I overcame my quesadilla dithering.

Going Italian

Ah, Italian food. Whenever I get a little tired of fish sauce or soy sauce, I can just readjust my attention to tomatoes, basil and garlic. Rather than noodles, I can have pasta. Olive oil goes into the pan, not peanut oil, and one sautes rather than stir-frying. Well, ok, maybe the differences between some of these things are judgement calls, but Italian food is a good way of satisfying myself when I want "normal" food.

The first recipe I cooked from Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks Dinner was fettuccini carbonara. I thought it worked out well, but there were a couple of things I wanted to tweak. I got my chance to do that recently when I used Bittman's recipe for "Pasta alla Gricia," which is the base recipe from which the carbonara recipe "deviates." The interesting thing was that my tweaking didn't make any difference. I substituted regular olive oil for extra virgin olive oil because I thought the extra virgin olive burned and gave the carbonara a bitter undertone. Apparently the oil was not the culprit, because the pasta alla gricia had the same taste. Perhaps I cooked the pancetta too hard and too long? Pasta alla gricia is a simple dish (which is what attracted me to it on the night in question); cook the pancetta and pasta, combine them, then serve after stirring in some Pecorino Romano cheese. This was the first time I'd cooked with Pecorino Romano cheese and that, too, seemed somewhat bitter to me (though I'm the first to admit I'm not the world's biggest cheese fan).

The other night, I was looking for another simple pasta recipe. This time I used Anne Casale's Italian Family Cooking. I settled upon "Bucatini with Plain Tomato Sauce," although I used spinach fettuccini for it as well (it was the pasta I had in the house). For the sauce, one slowly sautes half a cup of chopped onion in a blend of two tablespoons each of olive oil and butter until soft but not brown. Add two large garlic cloves, halved, and again saute until soft but not brown. Add a 28 ounce can of crushed concentrated tomatoes, one and a half tablespoons of minced fresh basil, half a teaspoon of sugar and one teaspoon each of salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then turn heat down to low and let simmer, partially covered, for about 25 minutes. Casale recommends lots of stirring during these stages of sauce creation, but I stirred only occasionally and it didn't seem to hurt the end result. After the 25 minutes are up, let the sauce rest for an hour before cooking the pasta. I just cooked the pasta and dumped the sauce on top of it, although Casale gives slightly more involved directions for how to combine pasta and sauce.

This was very tasty. The sauce was mild and tomatoey (just what you want this time of year) and was very easy to make. The onions give it a bit more depth, but still make it sweet rather than spicy. This would be easy to tweak in various directions, as well. There was plenty for leftovers the next day. With results like this, I'm definitely emboldened to try Italian cooking on a more consistent basis in the future.