Winner, winner meatball dinner 🍝
Have some olive oil cake for breakfast, stew some ginger marmalade, and make a ~cozy~ meatball dinner.
This week, we stay at home and cook up a storm. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Meatballs in red wine and caramelized shallot marinara sauce
Recipe only very loosely approximated off NYT Cooking
I missed the meatballs at Black Mountain Wine house so much I set out to make my own, and holy shit, it was the best dinner I’ve made in lockdown (and I’ve been cooking a lot!). I started with a pound of grass-fed beef from the freezer, used this basic meatball recipe from NYT Cooking, adding a dash of soy sauce, freshly chopped parsley, two crushed garlic cloves, half a grated onion, a dash of smoked paprika, and a splash of milk. Then I made an improvised tomato sauce, caramelizing four chopped shallots in a big pan with a generous amount of olive oil, pouring in two cans of plain tomato sauce (the kind that is just pureed tomatoes and salt), a half-glass of red wine (drink the other half!), two crushed garlic cloves, half a grated onion, and letting it simmer down to thicken. I formed the meatball mixture into balls with my hands, and then laid them out in concentric circles, shut the lid, and let it all simmer for 20-30 minutes, until tender. The result was possibly the tastiest tomato sauce I’ve ever had, rich with beef stock, and super flavorful, hearty meatballs.
Orange almond olive oil cake chez moi
Recipe adapted from Gina DePalma, via Serious Eats
I’ve decided that the only way I’m going to make it through this pandemic is if I can have a cake in the oven at all times. Or at the very least, a cake in the bread drawer at all times, for breakfast cake, afternoon snack cake, and late-night box-wine cake. This orange-scented olive oil cake is a perfect recipe for all those occasions: It bakes up beautifully moist, with a light, spongey crumb, a pretty orange-yellow hue, and makes your apartment smell like citrus while it cooks. It tastes like both olive oil and orange, which makes me happy. I made mine in a loaf pan, because in my opinion, loaf cakes are the best cake-shape, because of the resemblance to cat-loafs, and baked for 45 minutes. Oh, the recipe calls for ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon of oil, and I just tossed out that 1 tablespoon because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The original recipe calls for a brown-butter glaze; I’m sure that’s wonderful but for the sake of snack-cake, I skipped it.
Scallion-oil sourdough focaccia at home
Recipe adapted from Alexandra Cooks
I highly recommend taking any savory bread recipe you make (now that we’re all in the Sourdough Club!) and topping the shit out of it with thinly sliced fresh scallions drenched in oil and salt. Your Italian grandma might hate me, because I drowned my fresh focaccia in scallion oil, but she’s definitely missing out. What began as a last minute inspiration (I ran out of olive oil, but canola felt too flavorless) turned into a super-flavorful upgrade. Scallion oil seeps into the spongy focaccia dough and sizzles the edges to a crisp, while the veggies themselves brown nicely. For the focaccia, I used my homemade starter and this recipe from Alexandra Cooks, and topped it with a mixture of about ¼ cup canola oil, a teaspoon of kosher salt, and three very thinly sliced scallions, macerated for about 30 minutes. Be warned it takes about 24 hours from start to finish but less than 10 minutes of hands-on time, and we’ve all got nowhere to go, right? Oh, and grease the pan very, very well.
Orange ginger marmalade at home
Recipe very loosely adapted from NYT Cooking
I got a bit too excited about supporting Chinatown (and the prospect of fresh produce!) and ordered a crate of 56 navel oranges from asian-veggies.com.* After delivering two dozen to a friend, I was still left with way more oranges than I could eat. All the orange-scented baked goods I could think of either only used juice and zest (which felt wasteful), or far too few oranges, like my favorite whole orange cake. So I decided to make marmalade. Homemade marmalade is a labor of love, involving tons of slicing and stirring a hot sticky pot of orange soup for an hour or two, but it fills your apartment with natural aromatherapy as it cooks. I very loosely followed this recipe for Meyer Lemon and Blood Orange Marmalade from NYT Cooking; and by very loosely I mean you should avert your eyes now if my complete and utter lack of ability to follow instructions bothers you. If it doesn’t, here’s the substitutions I made: I used 4 cups of whole oranges, scrubbed, quartered and sliced paper thin; ½ lemon, scrubbed, quartered and sliced paper thin; 4 cups filtered water; boiled the mixture for 30 minutes, then stirred in 3 cups (rather than 4 cups, for a 1:1:1 volume ratio) of white sugar and an inch of peeled grated ginger, and cooked it for a little over an hour until it thickened. The cool thing about marmalade is that it is pretty forgiving as long as you are stubborn enough to force it to gel with sheer force of will.
* Highly recommend, btw — the pea shoots I ordered were some of the freshest I’d ever seen, which my Mom confirmed over FaceTime.
Pelicana boneless fried chicken with original sauce at home
Available for takeout and delivery on Seamless, check http://pelicanausa.com/.
I meant to make something healthy for dinner after work, but one thing led to another and all of a sudden I remembered that I have been trapped inside the same two rooms for 50 days with the same goddamn person and even though deep down inside I knew I was extremely fortunate for everything I have, I just really lost it. So Korean fried chicken for dinner it was. Sometimes even the best made plans of mice and men turn into fried chicken. I swear that KFC (Korean Fried Chicken) has emotional healing powers. Also, I’m pretty sure they sprinkle straight up white sugar on the sweet potato fries, along with MSG, and I’m living for it. Pelicana makes some of the best (maybe the best) KFC in town and it’s still doing both takeout and delivery; book it for the next time you have a meltdown.
XO,
Soph