Tonight we had an ambitious main course: duck ragu.  We served it with fresh pasta and an arugula, proscuitto, goat cheese and pine nut salad.  For extra flavor, we sauteed the pine nuts in the duck fat.  Making the duck ragu was A LOT of work.  First we had to get the skin and fat off the duck legs and thighs.  That took almost an hour.  Then we had to brown the duck, take the duck out of the pan, cook the other ingredients, add the duck back, cook for an hour, take the duck out AGAIN and remove the duck from the bones, add the duck back to the pan and cook some more (see below for photos of all the steps).  The end result was worth it.  Dad said it was one of the best meals we’d made.  For dessert we had chocolate chip cookie bars.  They are like chocolate chip cookies but they hold up better, especially if you pack them in lunches.  Just don’t leave them on your kitchen counter too long because they might disappear (like some of ours did)…

The full meal: duck ragu with fresh pasta; arugula, proscuitto, goat cheese and pine nut salad 

The arugula, goat cheese, proscuitto, pine nut salad

Ingredients for duck ragu (including dried porcini mushrooms)

Cutting the fat off the dug legs and thighs (with our new kitchen shears)

Finally most of the fat is gone from the duck

Browning the duck

After removing the duck, sauteeing onions, carrots and garlic

Adding more ingredients: tomatoes, red wine, chicken broth and dried porcini mushrooms

Now we add the duck back in.

After you add the duck back in to mix and let simmer, you have to take it out again, let cool and pull the duck off the bone…once you add that back in, and let cook some more, you finally have Duck Ragu!

Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars…putting them on the counter before dinner was a mistake (somebody snacked on them).

For this meal,we prepared for the cold winter in front of us by preparing a classic Winter Meal.  We made an endive Salad with fancy greens, walnuts and cranberries, goat cheese, maple vinaigrette, and “Turkey Pasta” (turkey cut into long, thin strips).  The maple syrup vinaigrette was so good! You could almost eat it without the salad. Our main course was a Shepherd’s Pie (with ground lamb, carrots peas and mashed potatoes).  For dessert we made an Apple Tart. We used puff pastry and then layered apples that had been tossed with brown sugar, cinnamon,  and butter.  We also were lucky to host Laura, an OPERA singer, for dinner. She liked the maple vinaigrette too.

Mom’s note: the kids used their new knives tonight for the first time.  Please beware! Most of us don’t have that sharp knives (I certainly don’t) so new knives (or just sharpened knives) are much quicker to cut through everything (including little fingers) so be careful.

Endive salad and shepherd’s pie.

Peeling potatoes for shepherd’s pie crust

Peeling More Potatoes (into our compost bag)

Group chopping of carrots

Sauteeing onion and carrots for shepherd’s pie

Adding lamb to onion and carrots

Alex’s turn to sautee

Adding peas…ready for mashed potato topping

Shepherd’s pie fresh out of the oven

Puff pastry apple tarts…before the puff!

Finished apple tart with whipped cream. Yum!

With our guest, OPERA Singer, Laura Krumm!!!

Today we made dinner for our mom’s book club.  Because some of the members are vegetarian, we decided to do a completely vegetarian meal.  For starters we made tomato bruschetta.  For the meal, we made: butternut squash soup (served with crème fraiche and pumpkin seeds on the side);  a hearty chickpea, tomato, mozzarella, pesto salad; and a traditional Greek salad.  We also made garlic croutons for the soup or just to munch on.  For dessert we served one of the pies we had made the night before with Taka, along with chocolate chip cookies.  We did most of the work beforehand so as not to disturb the book club, but we did make the bruschetta right when the book club arrived….it’s better served fresh.

(Mom said the green skull candles were a good touch since the book club was reading Strangers on A Train, where 2 people are murdered.)

The full meal…

Soup and croutons

Tomato bruschetta

Chickpea salad

The hardest part of making butternut squash soup? Peeling the squash!!

Whew! It’s peeled. Now we just have to chop it!

Chopped butternut squash and onions…

Immersion Blender. Great invention.

Read to serve

Tonight some of our friends came over and we had a pumpkin pie baking class from Chef Taka.  We had a lot of fun with our friends (maybe too much fun) and made 4 pies. While the pies were baking, we carved faces into acorn squashes. Then we rinsed the squash seeds really well and sautéed them in a hot pan with a lot of olive oil.  The cooked seeds tasted a lot better than the roasted pumpkin seeds we made last week.  They were a lot more cooked (and we used more oil which gave them more flavor).  Thanks Taka — both for showing us how to make pie and for improving our method of cooking squash (or pumpkin) seeds!

A couple of tips we learned while making pumpkin pie.  The recipe is really easy and is almost always on the can of pumpkin filling you buy.  But these three tips will help make the pies better.

1. Put the pie pan on a rimmed cookie sheet.  Then put the filling in the pie and then put the cookie sheet (with the pie) in the oven.  The filling is very runny until it cooks and its easy to spill. If it spills on the cookie sheet, no big deal, but if spills on the floor or in the oven, mom gets mad. Plus its easier to pull out the cookie sheet with the pie on it than just pull out the pie.

2. You have to let the pie sit for at least 2 hours before you eat it.  Otherwise its not set. ‘

3. (Most important), serve pie with fresh whipped cream.

Chef Taka setting up the ingredients for our class.

Discussing the various steps of pie making

Alex and Alexis hard at work.

The finished products!

Sauteeing the squash seeds…better than roasting them.

For this meal, we decided to get into Fall Spirit with pumpkin pie for dessert. The main course was ravioli, with two possible sauces, butter or a simple tomato/garlic sauce. Ali had the great idea to incorporate a cheese plate with roasted pumpkin seeds from our carved pumpkins into the meal (as an appetizer). We snacked on it throughout the meal prep.  We also made a corn, tomato and avocado salad, inspired by a healthy kids recipe that can be found on a website lower down on the page (in post No .28), although we change the recipe a little…adding bacon for example. Not quite so healthy but delish.  We also love the bright colors of the salad. One of our favorite fall side dishes, is, as shown in many previous posts… Apple Sauce!

Full Dinner!

Corn, tomato, avocado salad (with a little bacon:)

Cheese plate appetizer with cranberries and homemade roasted pumpkin seeds

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Peeling Apples (Koko supervising)

Applesauce with cinnamon

Mincing garlic with our new garlic press

Cooking simple tomato sauce for cheese ravioli (just tomato, garlic and olive oil)

Mixing the filling for pumpkin pie

Pumpkin pie, before baking

Pumpkin pie, just out of the oven

We decided that to be better chefs we needed our own set of “good” knives and so we decided to spend some of our prize money to go knife shopping.  We went to Sur la Table in Soho and a great knife expert, Vicki, showed us several options. We ended up each buying a 6 inch chef knife, a small pairing knife, a small serrated knife (for cutting tomatoes and other soft fruit or vegetables), a pair of kitchen shears (that can even cut through chicken bones) and a case to keep them in.  We also bought a garlic press because mincing garlic takes a long time. We didn’t get a big bread knife because we have two at home, so we really didn’t need those.  But the case has room to add more knives eventually. Vicki explained what to use the knives for, the best way to cut things, how to “hone” the knives and was super friendly.  Thanks Vicki and Sur la Table!

Checking out the knives at Sur la Table

Our Tough Chef stance, with knife expert, Vicki

Our new knives!