A Universal Experience « When necessary, use words.

A Universal Experience

In which we meet the recipe of the week/two weeks/whenever I change it.

Easter dinner, soup to nuts. (Or olives to better-than-sex cake, as the case may be.)

In my very first Easter away from my home, I knew that the thing I’d miss more than the little waterfall at Mass or the time in my old bedroom was the smell of my mom’s Easter ham. This just happens to be the same as our Christmas ham, but we all know that when you’re right, you’re right, and there’s no reason to vary the recipe. We’ve had lamb a few times on Easter, and Dad & Louie can whip up a sweet leg of lamb (especially if it happens to be one we used to play with…R.I.P. Spivey), but when we only get the ham twice a year, we stick to it.

So this year, with only eight vacation days left and dreams of fishing camp and extended autumn weekends looming, I opted not to travel home for Easter but instead share a meal with Chris, whom I’ve known since first grade, when we were the only two kids in our class to visit GATE (‘gifted classes,’ as our taunting classmates so lovingly called them). Over the next eight years, we’d leave St. Joe’s once a week to walk to the public school down the street and play board games, play computer games, play typing games, and read the newspaper. That this is all that was required of us may be a direct contributor to my misuse of my potential today, but I digress. Chris & I remained friends throughout high school, keeping each other grounded when we were thrust into the mishmash of school districts that was Serra Catholic. We still held tight that we were the brightest crayons to come from the South Allegheny district, and we met up every time we were both home from college — while I traveled south from Bonaventure, he rode the expanse of Pennsylvania on a Greyhound bus from Rutgers. Eventually his trips home became less frequent, as the world of girlfriends and pharmaceuticals pulled him away, and the rest of the guys and I would sit at the bar over Christmas break and brooding over the empty chair. To wrap, I moved out here. We haven’t seen each other enough, but we talk a few times a week, and we began exchanging recipes and cooking tips. It seems that from our humble (yet gifted!) beginnings we’d developed a love and talent for the craft of food prep.

SO. Long story not short, I asked Chris if we could prepare an Easter dinner together. It seems we’ve both had fickle friends who excitedly make lavish plans and never follow through, so we were each hesitant to bring up the meal to each other in the weeks before the holiday, just in case the other had been not-quite-serious. Being that Chris has a house, a dining room table, and a horde of delightful friends, I found myself on a train Saturday night, a Whole Foods bag overflowing with fresh produce and antipasti wedged under the seat in front of me. What follows is the meal in its entirety, with full recipes for some (my preps) and delicious descriptions for Chris’s makings, as I was too busy hoovering and food coma-ing to ask for recipes.

Guests included Chris’s girlfriend, Kim, their roommate Jen, and another friend named Jen who just happened to be Jewish and curious about the Easter mystery.

First up was a dish of aforementioned antipasti from the olive bar at Whole Foods: olives of all shades, stuffed peppers, marinated mushrooms, and a few stuffed grape leaves. We opened a bottle of Riesling while we finished up in the kitchen — the smells in this house were out of this world, a tease of what was just about to come from the oven.

Let’s get the biggest and baddest out of the way first:

Wham bam thank you ham

Wham, Bam, Thank You Ham

Ham is ham. If you can operate an oven and a meat thermometer, you can cook a ham. But to really ROCK a Wham, Bam, Thank You Ham, you need Mom’s bangarangin’ marinade. And this is how I did it on Saturday night:

2/3 c brown sugar

1/2 c cider vinegar

1 Tbs. cracked red pepper flakes

9 bay leaves, stems removed, crushed

9 cloves of garlic (at least!), crushed

1 Tbs. paprika

The night before, score the ham in a criss-crossed pattern, and insert about 20 cloves in the Xs. (More than 20 depending on the size of your ham…20 is for about an 8-lb ham.) Whisk all ingredients together, and pour 2/3 of it over the ham. Set aside the remaining one-third until tomorrow. The next day…Cook the ham according to the instructions on the package. About a half hour before it’s finished cooking, grab the rest of the marinade from the night before and whisk in about 1 Tbs of peach preserves. Drizzle the rest of this over the ham and finish cooking. If you’re not insane over the smell, you’re insane. When that baby is done, slice it up and devour.

Sliced WBTYHam

Sweet Potato Spoon Bread

So I understand fall and the whole season for sweet potatoes thing is over, but I don’t know anything that looks better next to a pink ham than a bright orange Sweet Potato Spoon Bread, originally from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Cooking, and introduced to me by none other than my partner in culinary crime, Erin.

Basic rundown: mash three big ol’ sweet potatoes (red-fleshed, so you’re better off shopping for yams so as not to get confused…be aware what is called a ‘yam’ in a store is not a true yam, but as long as you’ve got a potato-lookin’ thing with reddish/orangey insides, you’re going to be all right), sautee 3-4 shallots (sliced thin) in butter, mix together. Create a batter of 3/4 c flour, 1 c boiling water, salt & pepper. Mix into the sweeties and shallots, and crack & stir two eggs into the mixture (you can use a hand mixer or elbow grease; I inevitably go for the latter because I like to pretend that I have superhuman strength). Put 2/3 of this souffle-ish stuff at the bottom of a baking pan w/high sides, throw on a layer of goat cheese, top with the rest of the sweeties & maybe some grated parm. Bake for 25 minutes at 350, and you will soon have people worshipping your culinary feet. Trust me, it is the ultimate winning dish.

That was a little rough since I included the link to the recipe. I’ve found two eggs work just as well, if not better, than three, because three can really up the rich factor. Cooking time is a little quicker as well. I also have left out the onion powder in some instances, and there is no taste difference. Unless you have the uber-natural stuff (read: NO ERRONEOUS SODIUM), you’re OK without it. Throw in an extra shallot if you’re worried.

Braised Peas & Lettuce

Every weekend, I wake up around 9:30 or 10 and stumble the six or seven steps from my bed to my couch, where I collapse and slowly wake up while watching Food Network in HD. Every. Weekend. On Palm Sunday, prior to the puttanesca fest with Erin, all the cooks were preparing Easter dishes, and this particular one was a side thrown together by Aida Mollenkamp on “Ask Aida.” She had made some baaadass (get it?) lamb, and these were the perfect side. I thought the green — and combination of some of my favorite veggies — would fill a perfect third slot on the plate.

Recipe calls for 2 heads of butter lettuce. I had no idea what this was, even though it explicitly says “Boston or bibb” on the recipe, so I fudged and got iceberg. For some reason that seemed to me like it should be butter lettuce. Maybe because it tastes nothing like lettuce should. Regardless, I needed, like, half a head. I don’t know how Bostonians like their butter lettuce, but if I’m braising it along with two cups of frozen peas, I want an acceptable ratio.

If you’ve braised, this is routine — and exponentially quicker than a hunk of beef. Sautee some shallots (there they are again! I love these little gems.) in oil for a few minutes, add about a cup of chicken broth, bring to a boil and toss in chopped lettuce and 2 cups frozen peas. Turn heat down, simmer until peas are tender. Mix in a couple tablespoons of Greek yogurt & salt & pepper to taste. Outstanding.

Asparagus with butter/soy glaze

Erm…this is exactly what it sounds like. Chris made this one, and it’s from my mom’s recipe, which makes it incredibly depressing that I don’t know it by heart. Roast some asparagus spears, melt some butter, mix with one part soy sauce and 1/2 part balsamic vinegar, pour over roasted asparagus. Just taste it until you get it right. Sorry to both Mom & Chris for ruining this recipe in the blogosphere. I WILL say that the asparagus has become so traditional that if there are not stinky green spears alongside my ham, I’ll hurt like a turkey with no stuffing.

Crescia

(Note: It just took me a solid half hour to find this recipe since I couldn’t remember Mary Ann Esposito’s name for the life of me, and THEN I had to search through pages of recipes to locate it. But fear not, fearless reader, this bread is far too face-over-toes delicious for me to leave out.)

Honestly, I’m not one for baking bread. I’ll only make my own pasta if I’ve got a solid six hours on a weekend when I don’t want to go to the gym and I’m planning to only eat one meal over a span of two days. So the fact that Chris can spend a whole day happily baking a perfect, crusty loaf of bread is a quality I greatly admire.

Needless to say, I can’t explain how he did it. Saturday night he’d disappear into the kitchen for a while, returning to mutter something or another about yeast rising and then sitting down with us to sample the melon hookah tobacco. Sunday morning he beat up a blob of dough, and at dinnertime we had the most crumbly, richest, most savory bread I’ve tried in my lifetime. (This in no way complicates my love for Mom’s cheddar-sage biscuits. Bread & biscuits are two different categories entirely.)

Here, the recipe.

Our sides, sitting innocent and unexpectant of the HOOVERING about to take place.

I never compromise my love for a pretty plate.

“…I think maybe it is” cake

And to close out the meal? Aside from the endless forking of sweet potatoes and peas, ganking of asparagus and sucking it down like noodles, and of course the hour or so following dinner where we sat on the couch and watched Ashton Kutcher do whatever he does…Chris lovingly whipped up (with only a slight whipping issue) a cake miss Paula Deen so teasingly dubbed “Is it really better than sex? cake.” And though I’m not sure I’m quite the authority to answer, suffice to say that it was the absolute perfect wrap-up to what wasn’t just a perfectly executed meal, but a well-deserved and much-needed weekend with people who do right for the soul. And I must not have been the only one who thought this…for see what only five already-stuffed 20-somethings can do to a cake.