Don’t fool yourself – Nutella is not really health food. It’s as calorie dense as butter. The amount of Nutella spread on a crepe-to-go probably exceeds 1000 calories with ease. Yes, it’s made from hazelnuts, so you’re getting a bit of a dose of fiber and vitamins, but it’s really just a spread of palm oil, sugar and cocoa powder. At least they removed the partially hydronated oils.

Small confession: I have a personal qualm against Nutella. As if adding “the goodness of skim milk!” means it is “skim milk healthy!” Really, even “skim milk healthy” is a bit of a misnomer to me — but I do love me a good mix of chocolate and hazelnuts, as I know many others do, and when I found this stuff on sale, I decided to give this recipe a shot.

These cookies spread like a (bad joke here), so try to evenly space them as much as possible when baking. The results are the incredibly thin, yet incredibly chewy type of cookie with an intensely chocolate flavor. I liked watching them bake (yes, I sometimes devote 10 minutes of my life to sitting in front of the oven window) and then watching them desperately try to maintain a hold on the large macadamia nuts with their limp grips as I transferred them to the cooling racks.

Nutella Macadamia Nut Cookies

• 1 1/2 sticks (175g) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup(ish) (150g) brown sugar
• 1 cup (150g) sugar
• 2 eggs, room temperature
• 400g jar of Nutella
• 1 cup (150g) flour
• 1/4 cup (25g) cocoa powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup roasted macadamia or hazelnuts

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees with the rack positioned in the center.
2. Cream together butter and both sugars until light and fluffy. Combine this with the Nutella and then add the eggs, one at a time, whipping until the mixture is smooth and satiny.
3. Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt and mix into the wet ingredients. Fold in the macadamia nuts with a spatula until well combined.
4. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Place 9 heaping tablespoons per baking sheet, trying to distribute the nuts evenly. Bake until the cookies have spread out and just look slightly damp in the cracks, about 12-15 minutes. Room from the oven and cool slightly before transferring to wire racks to cool completely.

Hand Pulled Noodles (La Mian)

This humble bowl of broth and noodles took me only two days to prepare! It was good.

“It was good,” isn’t a particularly convincing phrase to encourage you to spend several days making a bowl of soup, I’m sure. This isn’t slow simmering time either, it was labor-intensive, hard on the back from standing for so long, time-consuming work that I could’ve spent doing many other things. I’m definitely not trying to convince you to make this. If anything, I’m trying to deter you, while simultaneously coaxing sympathy for myself. Basically, I just spent two days trying to practice hand pulling noodles and never even got the dough to the right consistency. It is but a small consolation that the entire English population of the Internet also seems confused by this matter.

After all that research and work, here’s what I know. La mian dough definitely consists of at least two ingredients: water and flour. That’s basically all I know for sure. The flour may or may not be pastry, cake, all purpose or bread flour or a blend of these. The recipe may also contain some or none of the following: salt, eggs, oil, baking soda, and an ingredient that may or may not translate to alum or lye; neither of which I really want to add to my food. The dough should either be sticky or smooth and should maybe be kneaded a lot to develop the gluten from the low or high protein flour and then allowed to rest a lot to relax the gluten. Probably a combination of these things several times.

Here’s what I did: combined 1 cup of warm water with enough all purpose flour to make a dough that didn’t stick to my hands and kneaded it for 20 minutes before getting fed up. Let it rest for an hour and then kneaded it for another 20 minutes. Then I decided to leave it overnight to see if it’d improve. It had risen slightly, had a different smell and was a bit smoother and easier to work with, but still pulled apart very easily.

So, I pulled out my pasta machine, not because I was going to use it to make the noodles — at first, anyway — but because I thought folding the dough over and over in the pasta machine would help develop the gluten and give it the right consistency. This was actually significantly more successful and might’ve expedited the whole kneading process and eventually arrived at a dough I would’ve been able to practice the hand pulling technique with, were it not for the already 40 minutes I’d wasted kneading and didn’t want to repeat. I ended up incorporating an additional cup of flour in the process because the dough was far too sticky for the pasta machine. I don’t know to what extent that affected the consistency of the dough either.

I decided, after trying to pull the noodles all of once and having them tear, that I had, in fact, accomplished at least something, and proceeded to roll out the dough in the machine. I ended up with roughly a pound of ramen-like noodles about 10 feet long. I cooked up a few ounces and savored a few bites in a homemade chicken stock, and gave the rest to my neighbors because I knew I’d never eat it all before they went bad. The noodles had a bit of a chewiness to them which was nice, but at this point nothing could really redeem the time invested.

So I still have no idea what is supposed to be in the dough and why I couldn’t get it to a state where it wouldn’t easily tear and am saddened that I did not get to practice the hand pulling technique. If you feel so inclined, watch this video to see how cool I wanted to be and failed miserably at.

Our last trip to Costco I picked up a 3.5 kilogram centercut pork loin for $17. It’s hard to pass up a nice cut of meat like that. I sliced off a reasonably sized roast, threw that in the freezer and set out to decide the fate of the rest of it. It didn’t take much time to decide I’d brine it and smoke it to deliciousness.

It just so happens we bought the perfect container to brine such a roast, a 24 can Coleman cooler. We picked this up not for beer, but to do a repeat performance of the sous-vide hack, which I just realized I backburnered and forgot to ever post about. Oops. All I had to do was divide the cooler in half using three Ziploc containers filled with water, and a gallon of brine covered the meat perfectly.

Brining is an amazing process. I like to marvel at how much weight it adds (usually around 10% — which is how much water you’re usually paying for with a supermarket pre-seasoned for your convenience! roast). It just helps the flavor permeate all the way to the center of the roast and acts as a general juiciness safeguard from the cooking process. Be careful though, as the saltwater that has absorbed into the meat can ultimately backfire if you overcook way too much — water will evaporate, but salt will not. It is an essential step for smoking anything really, but certainly helps protect leaner cuts of meat from drying out.

My neighbors don’t seem so thrilled when I smoke things in the backyard for several hours, and I feel a little uncomfortable with this every time I do it… that is, until I’m eating the results, and then I don’t really care about much else. This is definitely a time-consuming recipe, but the actual work involved is next to minimal. The resulting meat is infused with a deep smoky flavor and tastes very much like a fresh, nitrate-free ham, which even my disgruntled neighbors will have to admit is worth a little stink.

Applewood Smoked Pork Loin

• 1 gallon water
• 1 cup kosher salt
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 1 large sprig rosemary
• 1 red chili, split and seeded
• 5 cloves garlic, crushed
• 6 pound boneless pork loin
• black pepper

1. Bring the water to a boil with the salt and sugar. Remove from the heat, add the rosemary, chili and garlic and let cool to room temperature.
2. Place the pork in a container large enough to hold it. Cover it with the prepared brine (make sure it is fully submerged, using a plate as a weight if necessary), put the lid on/cover with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator. Leave it in there for 24-36 hours to fully absorb the brine.
3. After the appropriate amount of time has elapsed, remove the pork from the cooler. Place racks on a sheet pan and put the pork on top, so that it is elevated and air can flow on all sides. Return this to the refrigerator uncovered and leave overnight to dry out the exterior of the pork, to allow more smoke to permeate it.
4. Remove the pork from the refrigerator half an hour to an hour before preparing to smoke it. The meat will cook more evenly if it is brought to room temperature first. Since it has been cured with the salt it will inhibit growth of microbes, but this amount of time isn’t really a threat to your health anyway. While the meat is coming to temperature, soak half a smoker box worth of applewood chips in water.
5. Heat your propane barbecue to medium-low or light a chimney full of charcoals. When the pork is ready, drain the wood chips and combine with an equal portion of dry in the smoker box, and place this directly on the coals or barbecue. If using a charcoal barbecue, make sure you have the coals distributed for indirect heat (pushed to the side the pork is not on). Once smoke starts billowing out, put the pork fat side up on the grill grate and close the lid.
6. A box of wood chips will produce more than enough smoke to give this a deep flavor. Once all smoke has been extinguished, continue cooking until the roast reaches an internal temperature of 170 degrees, either finishing on the barbecue, or placing in a 350 degree oven elevated by a rack. Increase the temperature to high for the last 20 minutes of cooking to develop a crispier, crackling skin. Allow the meat to rest 10-15 minutes before carving.

We’re heading in to the perfect time of year to be buying up root vegetables. At their freshest, all of the natural sugars have yet to turn to starch and biting into a carrot or beet really isn’t so far off from a tree-plucked peach. As time goes on though, as much as root vegetables tend to keep for months under the proper conditions, they tend to lose a bit of that original luster, and you have to try a little bit harder to coax out their sweetness.

The easiest way is roasting. Even the natural sweetness of a potato is brought out after basking in high oven temperatures. Sometimes though, I like to cheat, adding a tablespoon or so of sugar that lightly caramelizes as well and brings the whole dish together. Sugar might seem like an unusual ingredient in savory cooking, but in many cases it’s actually quite welcome. In an effort to use up my herb garden before winter hits (there’s hardly enough light inside to keep a cactus alive), I tossed some rosemary and oregano with carrots and called it a dish. Sweet root vegetables and a little smear of butter, what could be better? They made a nice accompaniment to a barbecued steak dinner.

Roasted Sweet Herb Carrots

• 2 pounds small carrots, peeled and quartered to equal sizes
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 sprig rosemary
• 1 sprig oregano
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 teaspoons unsalted butter
• salt and pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees with a sheet pan inside.
2. Meanwhile, place carrots in a large pot of salted water and bring to a boil. Cook until they can be pierced with a fork, but not so easily that it goes right through and breaks the carrot. You can, of course, omit the boiling procedure, but I like it because things tend to cook more evenly. Drain the carrots, putting the colander back over the pot for a minute to evaporate any excess liquid.
3. Remove the hot pan from the oven, drizzle the oil into the pan and tilt it to coat. Toss in the rosemary and oregano sprigs and get hit with a blast of herbal fragrances, then add the carrots. Sprinkle the sugar evenly over them and return to the oven to roast for 20 minutes, turning once or twice.
4. When the carrots have roasted up, remove the herb sprigs, dissolve the pat of butter into the carrots and season liberally with black pepper and salt. Serve immediately.

It’s zucchini season, which means you have too much of it. Here’s a suggestion: don’t put zucchini in your pasta dish, make zucchini your pasta dish. Thin strands can mimic tagliatelle, julienned ribbons are reminiscent of spaghetti. Sure, no discerning critic is really going to be fooled, but at a casual glance it can at least look deceptive, and zucchini’s mild flavor pairs strikingly well in almost all instances where pasta would be served; tossed lightly with olive oil, parmesan and herbs, or with a hearty tomato or cream sauce.

Since zucchini is so porous, it absorbs flavors very well. The downside to using zucchini in place of pasta is that it contains a lot of moisture, which can’t really be cooked out without turning it to mush and can dilute your sauces. Still, it’s a nutritious and versatile substitute that cooks up quickly. It worked quite happily in this low carb version of lasagna and yielded enough leftovers to last us through the week’s lunches.

Zucchini Noodle Lasagna

• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
• 4 slices of dry cure bacon or pancetta, diced
• 1 pound (450g) ground veal
• 1 pound (450g) ground beef or pork
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 5.5 ounces tomato paste
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1/2 cup to 1 cup water
• 1 large carrot
• 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• salt and sugar to taste
• 2 zucchinis, at least 9″ long, sliced into 1/4″ thick ribbons
• 200g frozen spinach, thawed and drained
• 250g whole milk ricotta
• 12 ounce (340g) ball of mozzarella, shredded

1. Heat olive oil and bacon in a heavy bottomed sauce pan over medium heat and cook until the fat has rendered out. Remove the bacon and reserve.
2. Brown the veal and beef or pork in batches, breaking up as it cooks, until it is no longer pink. Set aside with the bacon.
3. Add the onion and sweat until translucent, then add the garlic, stirring for 30 seconds or so to prevent scorching. Add the wine and stir to remove any browned bits that may have stuck to the bottom of the pan and reduce by half.
4. Combine the tomato paste, milk and water into the pot. Bring to a simmer, then re-add the meat with the carrot and red pepper flakes. Simmer the sauce for a minimum of one hour, then season to taste with salt and sugar, if necessary. Remove the carrot and eat (this is the “chef’s treat” to me!)
5. Preheat your oven to 450 degrees.
6. To assemble the lasagna, take a 9×13″ pan and ladle a thin layer of your prepared sauce along the bottom. Top this with an even layer of your zucchini “noodles”. Ladle another layer of sauce and repeat with an additional layer of zucchini. Combine the spinach and ricotta and layer on top of the zucchini, then repeat with the remaining sauce and zucchini as necessary, finishing with sauce.
7. Top the lasagna with shredded cheese and bake in the center of the oven until the cheese is golden and bubbly, about 20 minutes, at which time the zucchini should be just cooked through. Cool slightly before slicing and serving.

There is no need to precook the “noodles” in this recipe, which means the entire lasagna can be ready for the dinner table in less than half an hour with a prepared sauce. It also freezes and reheats well.