All Hail the Mighty Kale

 

Hey, we post a lot of decadence here at Chez Venza, but we know how to eat healthy as well.  So we present to you Braised Kale with Pancetta.  You put good stuff in, you get good stuff out, right?  Let me tell you, this recipe is a damn winner.

 

Pictured: onion, lemon, garlic, pancetta, red pepper flake, homemade chicken stock and kale.  This was our first time cooking pancetta and maybe our second time cooking kale.  The kale does get a little lost in all the rich awesomeness in the sauce.  I think we’ll double the amount of kale next time,

Here is the pancetta.  It’s an italian-style unsmoked, thick cut bacon.  After having some killer pancetta brussel sprouts at a friends house, we finally worked up the courage to go to the deli counter at our grocery store and have the guy cut us a slab of this goodness.

You have to take the stems out of the kale.  Apparently they aren’t too good to eat.  Given all that you have to do to the leaf to make it tender, its no surprise that the stem might be a little too….fibrous.

Per the recipe, sautéing the pancetta onion and pepper flakes.  Next time, we’ll be cooking the pancetta by itself until it gets crispier, removing it, and adding it back to the dish at the end.  Following this recipe left the pancetta with a lot of its thick fat intact. 

The Kale goes in to wilt.

Braising in the awesomesness of homemade chicken stock.

Here’s the real kicker… the whole thing gets reduced until no liquid remains in the pan.  All that chicken stock has basically turned into a rich glaze for the kale and pancetta.

If only this were actually good for you!  All vegetables should taste this bacony and chickeny! 

The Sharlotka Inheritance

Does blogging work?  Just did.

We recently read a blog entry for Apple Sharlotka  (Shar-whatka?) on this blog.  It looked so good and easy, that we had to give it a whirl.

This recipe is also eerily similar to an apple pancake recipe from Penzey’s that we are quite fond of.  The difference is that this is more like a cake and is made in a springform pan.  You could still eat it with syrup though if you wanted to!

A Sharlotka is a Russian apple cake.  it is remarkably simple, takes almost no time to put together, and looks pretty impressive.  You start by dicing up 6 apples.  This is probably the most complicated part of the recipe.




 

The batter is pretty simple:  eggs, sugar, vanilla, and flour.




Pour on top of the apples, and then it goes in the oven.  As it cooks, the batter works its way in between the apples so that by the time you’re done… you have a complete, cohesive cake.



I was worried that it wasn’t going to hold together when we took it out of the pan, but it held up just fine!  We topped it with cinnamon and powdered sugar.

 




Serve with whipped cream (very American), sour cream (very Russian), or vanilla ice cream (very delicious)!

Blood Oranges are Thicker than Fennel

Every now and again, we try to make a dish that we’ve never heard of, much less tried before.  So, here we go on Blood Orange, Beet, and Fennel Salad.  No…. its not really a sexy name, but click through on that link and look at that photo!  I mean, wow!

So, when we found out that our local gourmet grocery chain was having a sale on blood oranges (not something we usually see), we decided to give this one a whirl.



We haven’t even touched these ingredients yet and they already look pretty exotic.  Funky fennel, two types of beets, lots of citrus.  Good Stuff.



We’ve never cooked with beets.  We’ve rarely EATEN beets.  The recipe called for us to trim them down, wrap them in foil, and roast them at 400 degrees for an hour.



After roasting, the skins slide right off… then they get all sliced and diced.



The recipe called for blood oranges, which have a great dark red color, plus one naval orange.  Here we cut away all the rind and the pith.  How pithy they were.



Then we used a technique called “supreming.”  Luckily I had learned how to do this at a knife skills cooking class.  It basically involves cutting the meat of the orange segments away from the skins.



The oranges that didn’t get supremed just got sliced. How can you resist those colors!



Next we trimmed and mandolined the fennel and red onion into thin slices.  Fennel has a licorice–like flavor, but is also similar to a mild onion.



After carefully, and decoratively stacking all of the stuff we sliced up, we took the citrus juice from the bowl and added olive oil, salt, and pepper to make a really great vinaigrette that got drizzled all over the plate.  Then cilantro to garnish.

The flavor of the oranges and the onion and fennel were great.  The beets…I thought would be sweet… but after roasting, they were actually kind of bitter.  I’m the only one who seemed to complain about them though, but maybe that’s because….



…they stained my hand red for a day!  I looked like I’d voted multiple times in an Iraqi election!

Chicken Venz-anese

So we’re suckers for chicken dishes.  Chicken is cheap, plentiful, and delicious.

We’re also suckers for braising.  You’d have to be with as many dutch ovens as we have.  Braising lets you take an otherwise tough cut of meat and cook it low and slow in a bunch of yumminess until the fat has rendered out and left you with a fall-off-the-bone tender treat.

This week we made a braised chicken thigh dish called Chicken Canzanese (free registration required).  We’d never heard of the dish before this recipe, but apparently it is an old recipe of indeterminate origins.  After trying this, one can only imagine that Canzanese  translates to deliciousness!



A lot of the usual suspects.  Put good stuff in…. get good stuff out!

First step is bacon.  All good things start with bacon.

Now, it's true, this recipe calls for prosciutto, and we used bacon instead.   An enormous pet peeve of ours is when you are reading the commentary on a recipe and someone says “I hated this recipe.  However, I changed about half of the steps and substituted a bunch of other ingredients.”   Prosciutto is delicious awesome stuff, but we had bacon on hand, and it is a reasonable substitute.

We cut the bacon up French-style into lardons, and rendered them in our trusty dutch oven.  We also sliced up some garlic into long thin slices (pictured later) and fried it in the bacon grease until golden brown.



Next step was trimming the chicken thighs. This should actually be the first step considering how long it can take, depending on how much of the fat you want to trim.  Chicken thighs cook up nice and tender and retain their moisture (unlike chicken breast, which can easily over-cook).



The bacon and garlic were removed from the pot, and then we browned the chicken.  All that chicken skin goes face down into the bacon grease to brown and render off a lot of the fat.

 

Mmm…look how nice and crispy they look!  That golden color is pure crispy flavor.



We added some wine and broth to the pot, and then stirred in the aromatics:  the reserved bacon & garlic from before, fresh sage, rosemary (that I stole from a neighbor’s front yard), bay leaves, clove, and red pepper flake.



Then it goes into the oven for a nice low and slow braise for a little over an hour.



Fresh out of the oven.



The chicken is removed, and the sauce is reduced some more over the stove.  All that sauce becomes thickened and more concentrated.

***Let me be clear about this.  This gravy is like crack.  Chicken-flavored crack.  Must stop blogging and go make more gravy***



And just to make it more special, we served the chicken on top of polenta (or grits).  Much has been blogged in the past about polenta, so you can check that out here.



And there you have it.  It was simple, the sauce is amazing, and it all just melts together in your mouth.  We'll definitely be making this one again sometime!

Not Yo' Mama’s Salmon Cakes

We recently had a conversation with a friend about meat loafs.  Not just your standard meatloaf made with  hamburger meat, but any meat that you can turn into a loaf.  For example…meatballs, crabcakes, turkey burgers.  They’re all basically the same, right?  Some type of ground meat, bread, spices, maybe some egg to hold it all together.  But how come you never see chicken burgers made with ground chicken?    Why is it always the lowly chicken breast?  And you never see Chicken Loaf?  What’s up with that??! 

Moving on…we recently received this cookbook for Christmas from America’s Test Kitchen.  Brace yourselves…you’ll be seeing a lot more of this book on this blog!  We also recently purchased this book from Cook’s Illustrated.  Have we gone mad??!

So the first recipe we decided to try was Southwestern Salmon Cakes.  I am pretty sure this is the same thing as “salmon croquettes,” which sounds fancier.  However, I think most salmon croquettes are made from canned salmon.  My mom tried to get me to eat canned salmon once when I was a kid.  It was the only time in my life I refused to eat something she made for dinner.  Something about it was just really unappealing.  

THIS, however, is completely different.  We start out with fresh salmon and cut it up into little pieces.  Seems like a lot of trouble, right?  Well…it was.  But I think it was worth it.  Next time, however, I will ask the butcher to remove the skin from the bottom.  THAT was a big pain as well.

 

Ingredients include:  cilantro, scallions, panko breadcrumbs, mayo, sour cream, green chilies, and lime juice.  The green chilies are what make this recipe “southwestern.” 



The “sauce” is a mixture of mayo, sour cream, lime, and cilantro.  We also added sriracha for kicks.



In a separate bowl goes the cut up salmon, chilies, scallions, panko, and 3 tablespoons of the mayo mixture.  That orange squirt gun, by the way, is to keep the cat off the counter.  In case you were wondering.  Normally we would try to avoid having extraneous objects in our photos, but we failed this time.



All nice and mixed up.  



It was a little tricky to get them in patty form, but they held up well enough.



Next, they get an extra coating of panko so that the outside is nice and crispy.  Panko bread crumbs, if you're not familiar, are the embodiment of crunch. 

 

Into the fryer!



Crispy and flavorful.  It doesn’t have a fishy taste like you would expect, and the chilies were a nice addition.  We bought the “hot” hatch chilies, but they didn’t live up to the name.  Maybe next time we’ll add some cayenne or something to the mixture.  We like to keep things spicy here at Chez Venza!

Avocado’s Number

Every now and again… creativity takes hold with a viciousness.  This is one of those times.  This is an idea that began… and kept going until the internet and the concept were exhausted.  The result: deliciousness.

The basic idea: Make a tasty avocado ice cream in a form that LOOKED like an avocado.  Here we go!

(Reader is all like “Whaaaaa…….?”)



The key elements.  As you can tell, Chez Venza has a predilection for red appliances.  As it turns out, one of the key elements to this concept, the silicon oval mold, only came in red.  Quelle chance!

Avocado Ice Cream may sound strange to most, but really the creaminess, the fattiness, and the subtle flavor really lend themselves to the frozen form.  Austin is the right kind of town to inspire this kind of avant garde flavor… after all, you can get Avocado margaritas here! The internet is semi-awash in avocado ice cream recipes, but we eventually settled on this ONE.  It seemed to have all the elements that made sense… and that site has really great photography!

Luckily, Avocado’s were on sale… as it turns out, we got two separate types.



Check out the two different types of pits.  We bought four instead of three because they were so small.









Lime juice and lime zest for flavor and, and, this is important, to keep the avocado from oxidizing and turning brown.






All the goodness in the blender.  This proved to be slightly in error.  It was too much creaminess.  We should have blended the avocado and cream before adding the sour cream.  No worries!  We got it pureed!



All the green goodness into the ice cream maker!

 

After freezing, into the molds.



A crude attempt to create the faux-pit indentions.  It seemed like a good idea to do this while the ice cream was still soft an malleable.  It was a start, but the ice cream was too sticky to make clean scoops.



After freezing overnight, we cleaned up the indentions, and popped the ice cream out of the molds.  This ice cream is VERY stiff coming out of the freezer.  It needs to sit a good 10-12 minutes to soften before you try to eat it.



You can tell the difference between the molds that were filled first, with the soft ice cream at the top of the machine… and the ones that were filled with the stiffer ice cream from the bottom.  No matter!  no one will ever see this part.  Except for all of you.  Oops. 



Then, they are coated with Smucker’s Chocolate Magic Shell which created a hardened chocolate shell that resembled the avocado skin very quickly upon contact with cold ice cream.  Luckily, it didn’t harden too fast, which allowed us to spread it out more evenly.  The rough texture makes it even more avocado-like!



The final product!  We added a Lindt Chocolate truffle in the middle, to resemble the pit.  The avocado ice cream was very nice on its own.  When we’d tasted the unfrozen mixture the night before, there were concerns that it was too sweet and slightly too limey (that zest is powerful stuff), but freezing it muted the sweetness.  Oddly enough, it also really heightened the avocado flavor.  The addition of the chocolate shell was done purely for aesthetic purposes, but it also resulted in a happy surprise… chocolate tastes awesome with avocado ice cream!