Month: July 2023

Nova Cafe opens in Wilton

Nova Cafe opened in Wilton just a few days ago and it seems to already be a big hit judging from the steady flow of customers. A sister to Ridgefield’s Tazza Cafe, Nova has a similar but not identical menu.

Nova Café’s menu includes a variety of breakfast sandwiches, oatmeal and overnight oats dishes with various fruit and granola toppings, acai bowls and pastries for breakfast. For lunch, they offer some very interesting wraps like Buffalo Chicken and Chicken Gorgonzola, hot pressed paninis like Monte Cristos and Chipotle Chicken and signature sandwiches including roast beefs and smoked turkey and brie. They also offer sourdough cheese melts and about a dozen creative and delicious sounding salads.

We had breakfast there today, a little after the rush, around 9:30, and were impressed with the pleasant and hard-working staff and the delicious breakfast sandwiches.

One of us had the Bacon Egg and Cheese sandwich ($6.95) on a croissant (they were out of the hard rolls, but the croissant was delicious. In fact, it clearly had 2 eggs in it.

Our other choice was called Power Start ($7.95) and it was my favorite, made from eggs, ham, cheddar on toasted multigrain bread. As you can see from the picture, they did not skimp on ingredients. It was great!

Nova has a selection of their own coffees for sale as beans, or you can grind them on the spot.

One display case shows some of the pastries available, here mostly muffins and scones. Earlier they had a wider selection of pastries. The other display case shows the sandwiches and wraps prepared for the lunch rush.

While they clearly do a significant take-out business, there are a few tables in the main dining room and quite a few more tables in the airy secondary dining room. Considering the early, enthusiastic response to Nova, they will certainly need all those tables.

Our bill for the two sandwiches, coffee and tea with tax, and 15% tip was $25.50. We’ll be back for lunch sometime soon! Hours at their 200 Danbury Rd address are 6:30am to 6:30pm Monday through Saturday and Sunday from 7:00am to 6:00pm.

Welcome to Wilton, Nova Cafe! We wish you well!

James Beard’s Tomato Pie

I came across this really simple recipe for a savory tomato pie, published in Sarah Leah Chase’s newspaper column in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror. Chase and others trace the recipe back to Ruth Reichl, but I haven’t found anything with Beard’s imprimatur. However, a lot of Beard’s writing was collections of other people’s recipes, so we may never know who first made this really simple and delicious pie, which amounts to a biscuit dough crust and about 4 other ingredients. All I can tell you is that it was a hit at a group picnic/party I took it to recently, and so I’ll pass it on to you.

Basically, you make a batch of buttermilk biscuit dough and press it into a pie pan as the crust, fill it with a layer or two of sliced tomatoes, and top with a mixture of mayonnaise and cheddar cheese and bake it.

This recipe works fine with ordinary hothouse tomatoes, but it will probably excel with fresh garden tomatoes as well. We’ll soon find out!

First make the biscuit dough

2 cups flour
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
6 Tb cold unsalted butter (3/4 stick, or 3 oz.)
1 cup plus 2 Tb buttermilk
Chopped parsley

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Then cut up the butter into little cubes by slicing the stick of butter lengthwise along two long axes and then cutting it into slices along the short axis, which will each fall into four pieces. Then blend the butter into the flour with a pastry blender and toss in a small handful of chopped parsley, and mix in the buttermilk. No need to roll the dough out: just press the whole ball into a 9-inch pie pan and spread it to fill the pan and up the sides.

Then make the tomato pie

4-6 ripe tomatoes, in thick slices
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1 ½ cups mayonnaise
Fresh basil leaves, chopped
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 375˚ F.
Spread the tomato slices on top of the biscuit dough, filling the pan, and sprinkle with salt and pepper, and sprinkle the chopped basil on top.
Mix the mayonnaise and cheddar cheese and spread over the top of the tomatoes.
Spread some more chopped basil leaves on top.
Bake about 35 minutes.

Let it rest for 10-15 minutes and serve warm, or chill it and serve it cold. Cold, it is a great addition to a picnic or party.

Easy popovers in less than an hour

Even though popovers are really easy to make, they have the reputation of being difficult and in the domain of expert chefs instead of a simple dinner roll anyone can turn out in very short order.

For some years, we have been using this somewhat elaborate recipe by Marlene Sorosky Gray first published in Hearst papers some 10 years ago. It even requires overnight refrigeration, but makes great popovers. However, Gray’s text suggest that almost any of a dozen common variations work just as well, so we set out to find the easiest one.

We started with this really simple King Arthur Baking recipe, since their bakers have a way of simplifying things for the average user. And we must say that recipe is a winner too, and terribly easy to follow. There are only 5 ingredients in their popovers (and ours) and the recipe is so simple, you’ll have it learned in no time.

4 eggs
1-1/2 cups milk
1-1/2 cups flour
3 Tb melted unsalted butter.
1 tsp salt

There are three tricks we use to make these popovers work.

Start with warm ingredients, no cold milk or eggs.
Use non-stick spray on the popover or muffin pan.
Cook at 450˚ F and finish at 350˚ F.

Making Popovers in a Popover Pan

Preheat the oven to 450˚ F. Place an empty cookie sheet on the very top shelf to keep the tops of the popovers from burning.
Place the 4 eggs in a bowl of hot tap water for 10 minutes, to bring them to room temperature.
Heat the 1-1/2 cups of milk in the microwave for 75 seconds to make sure it is warm.
Melt the 3 Tb butter in the microwave for 1 minute at 50% power.
Empty water from the bowl, dry it slightly and reuse it to mix the batter.
Break the eggs into the bowl, and beat them with a whisk, and then add the milk and beat briefly to mix the eggs and milk together.
Add the flour and salt and mix with a whisk until uniform. Small lumps are OK, but beat the mixture for a minute or so until the batter is somewhat foamy.
Mix in the melted butter.
Spray the popover pan cups with non-stick spray and then fill each cup about ¾ full.
Bake at 450˚ F for 20 minutes, without opening the oven.
Reduce the heat to 350˚ F and bake for 20 minutes more, without opening the oven. If you bake them at 350˚ F for only 15 minutes, you will get fluffy popovers that deflate a bit as they cool, but are very tender. At 20 minutes, you get a firm shell that will hold its shape.
Take the popover pan out of the oven and serve the popovers hot, right away, with butter or butter and honey.

If you must let them sit and cool, you can reheat them in the microwave for 1 minute (this keeps them soft) or in the oven for 5 minutes (this hardens the crust somewhat.)

Some people serve popovers with things like chicken salad and scoop the salad into the popover shell. We think that’s nuts. Serve the hot popovers alongside the cold salad, so they stay hot to spread with butter (and honey).

Leftover popovers, still make a nice shell for breakfast and lunch dishes. We reheated a popover, split it open and filled it with scrambled eggs.

We also make a nice cold meatloaf sandwich with a cold popover. You could even use them as hamburger rolls! They are also great snacks with jam or with peanut butter!

Cooking time in various pans

We baked popovers countless times in various pans to give you the details. We used three different sized pans.

The standard popover pan holds 5 oz. of batter and makes six towering popovers. Just follow the recipe above.
The large muffin pan holds 2.5 fluid oz. of batter and makes a dozen moderate sized popovers.
The small muffin pan has 2 oz. cups and makes a dozen modest popovers.

Large Muffin Pan

Making popovers in a muffin pan with only 2.5 oz. of batter is much the same as using the big popover pan: you just get smaller popovers. Be sure to spray the pan well with nonstick spray as the nonstick coating is probably not as effective as the popover pan’s is.

We found that you need to reduce the cooking time at high temperature (450˚ F) from 20 minutes to 15. We tried several different times at 350˚ F: 10 or 15 minutes gave you light puffy popovers that sagged a bit as they cooled. But at 20 minutes, we got a firmer shell that is probably better for serving a group, or for filling the inside.

Smaller Muffin Pan

In the small 2.0 oz. muffin pan, you have a lot less leeway, since the muffins are smaller. As before we found that 15 min at 450˚ F worked well, and 15 minutes at 350 ˚F gave you nice puffy popovers that deflated a bit when cooled. But if you went to 20 minutes, the popovers were quite dark and firm although not quite burned. Stick with 15/15 for this size pan, although you could try 15/17 if you wanted to experiment. Of course, ovens vary and these times may be different in your oven.

Minimuffin pan

Our minimuffin pan holds 24 small muffins, with each cup containing only 1.5 oz. So after a couple of tries, we found that you get perfect mini-popovers by baking for 15 minutes at 450˚ F and for 10 minutes at 350˚ F. They are puffy but fairly firm and would be great for a party.