50 Recipes: #2, 3, and 4

[nonelvis]

All winners, which was good, considering I was making dinner for my parents, who'd just flown into town. Old recipes included as part of this meal were chopped liver, pickled carrot sticks, roasted mushrooms, and spinach sautéed with garlic, because no one leaves my house hungry.

#2 - Roast chicken with pancetta and olives
Weirdly, Whole Foods had no pancetta, so I substituted bacon; and annoyingly, neither my sister nor her husband like olives, so I substituted large capers. It didn't matter, because this recipe was fabulous -- perfectly cooked chicken with crispy skin and loads of flavor from the fresh herbs. Definitely making this again.

#3 - polenta with Franklin's Teleme
Again, some substitutions: instant polenta, because hell if I am going to spend 20 minutes trapped in the kitchen stirring when I'm supposed to be entertaining my family, and different cheese, because I didn't have time to go to Formaggio Kitchen to get Franklin's Teleme. Fortunately, the recipe provides instructions for subbing in a combination of parmesan and mascarpone cheese. It was delicious, though admittedly, anything with that much cheese and half a stick of butter is going to taste good.

#4 - ricotta cheesecake
How do you make that homemade ricotta taste even better? Turn it into cheesecake!

I barely managed to avert disaster when I realized, three minutes after the cake had gone into the oven, that I'd forgotten to add the flour. It's a small amount, though, so I pulled out the cake and carefully stirred in the flour, disturbing only a small amount of the crust in the process. The final product is surprisingly light (probably due to the half-dozen eggs) and very subtly perfumed with lemon and cinnamon.

Comments

[elainetyger.livejournal.com]

Ha, I also get annoyed when people don't like olives! I mean, it's olives, dammit!

[nonelvis]

Truly, it's mystifying. It's a good thing both my sister and her husband like garlic, or I'd never bother cooking for them.