Tom Douglas

Saturday Dinner for Friends by Shelley L.

Here’s my menu:

Robiola cheese toasts with peppers

Ground lamb and pistachio kebabs (photo left)

Lola’s pitas (purchased from Dahlia Bakery)

Tzatziki

Arugula, watercress, and mint salad with lemon and olive oil

Garlic smashed potatoes (photo top)

Rhubarb crostatas with vanilla ice cream (photo center)

I stole the cheese toasts idea from an appetizer on the Serious Pie menu.  Robiola (a soft-ripened cheese from the Piedmont- you can find it at the Whole Foods cheese counter, for example) is spooned onto small toasts, then put the toasts in a hot oven to melt the cheese.  Add peppers on top before serving. (Serious Pie uses these great Calabria peppers.  I used Mama Lil’s.)

The kebab recipe is from one of my favorite cookbooks, Spice, by Ana Sortun, one of my favorite people and a marvelous cook who’s also the chef owner of Oleana in Boston.  I used ground lamb instead of the ground beef specified in the recipe.  The wonderful trick in this recipe is that you beat the raw meat mixture in a Kitchen Aid with the paddle until the meat is sticky-smooth.  This gives the cooked kebabs an incredible sausage-like texture. My husband, Frank, did his usual excellent job on the grill.

The potatoes are from another one of my favorite cookbooks, Tom’s Big Dinners. Tom dreamed up the garlic smashed potato recipe before Lola existed, now you can eat them anytime you want to at Lola.  We ate every last potato out of a huge roasting pan of them because they were so darn delicious, with the crevices in the smashed places on each crisp and crusty potato absorbing the olive oil, garlic, Greek oregano, salt and pepper.  There’s also a tzatziki recipe (called Cool Cucumber Yogurt) in Big Dinners.  Be sure to use whole fat Greek yogurt.

The crostatas are a dessert we serve with different fruit fillings at all the restaurants pretty frequently.  Here’s my version, though I plan to get Pastry Chef Garrett’s fabulous dough recipe one of these days.  Though if I do say so myself, these were pretty fabulous as well, and of course I made them with local, Washington rhubarb. Here’s the recipe:

Rhubarb Crostatas

6 servings

For the dough:

2  1/2 cups flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon salt

2 sticks cold unsalted butter, cut into dice

about 1/2 cup ice water, or more as needed

For the filling:

2 pounds rhubarb, cut into small dice

3/4 cup sugar, plus more for sprinkling

2 tablespoons plus 1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch

Eggwash: 1 yolk beaten with 2 teaspoons cold water

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

To make the dough, combine the flour, sugar, and salt in the bowl of a food processor.  Add the butter and pulse a few times to combine.  Add ice water, a little bit at a time, pulsing briefly, using as much water as needed to get the dough moist enough to just barely hold together (don’t pulse it into a ball- that’s too much water).  Remove the dough from the machine, wrap in plastic, and chill about an hour.  Divide the dough into 6 pieces. On a lightly floured board, roll each piece into a circle.  Trim the circles to about 7 or 8 inches in diameter.

To make the fillling, toss the rhubarb with the sugar and cornstarch.  Divide the filling among the pastry circles, mounding it in the center of each circle and leaving a 1 1/2 inch border of dough around the edges.  (You may have a little more rhubarb than you need to fill the circles nicely; don’t worry about using up every bit.)  For each crostata, brush the border of dough with a little eggwash, then crimp the dough up around the mound of rhubarb.  Brush the outside of the dough with eggwash, then sprinkle lightly with sugar.  Place the crostatas on parchment-lined baking sheets and bake about 30 to 35 minutes, until the crusts are beautifully golden. (You can bake them a few hours ahead, leave at room temp, and reheat 5 minutes in a hot oven right before you serve.)  Remove crostatas from the oven and serve warm, with ice cream.

March 30th, 2009