More catching up

I did manage to get some cooking in during the past 8 months:

Maine shrimp ceviche--it's sad the season is so short, but that's part of what makes these so special. That way for the few weeks they're in season, we have an excuse to eat as many as we can!


Butternut squash gnocchi with local shitakes and brown butter...mmmmmmm


Cauliflower flan with chorizo:


Duck boobies with cherry sauce:



Lamb chops with barley and fennel:


Squash soup with onion sprouts--I swear restaurants copy us...the week after we made this we saw these sprouts on a bunch of different menus!


Black cod with macomber turnip, one of our new favorite veggies (and it's local!)


Duck ravioli with fennel and crispy duck skin--the ravioli were a bit undersalted :-(


Hopefully we'll be able to do much better than this over the summer!

Cooking

It's great to know a bunch of quick dishes for the days you don't feel like spending a lot of time in the kitchen. Here are a couple good ones:

Broccoli rabe with sausage. Here we added some tomato paste and red bell peppers, and served it with couscous (another super easy and quick side)


Pan roasted brussels sprouts with fish sauce and chili garlic sauce


When I have a bit more time, I like making things that will keep a few days, for example asian slaw.
Here I had red and green cabbage, cashews, and a sauce made with lime juice, fish sauce, sugar, soy sauce, ginger, and rice vinegar:


and I love potato salad (this one with onion, red pepper, mayo, spicy mustard, tarragon and thyme:


Finally, the fastest way to get food on the table is to have someone else make it! My husband made corn cakes with red pepper sauce, and a sausage (yeah, I know it looks like a giant turd).

Weekend breakfasts

Growing up, I ate cereal for breakfast pretty much every day, even on the weekends. No omelettes, pancakes, or anything that required cooking. Maybe occasionally I'd make french toast, but that was rare. Now, I love making a leisurely breakfast on the weekend.

Last weekend, we had scrambled eggs with local shitake mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, and scallion, topped with scamorza cheese.


Today we made salmon and potato patties, topped with a fried egg. Served on some cucumber and pepper strips lightly seasoned with rice vinegar and salt.

Comfort food

Even in the summer, sometimes comfort food really hits the spot.

Chili made with ground buffalo and kidney beans, served over polenta:


Cheesy garlic bread--this is possibly the best thing ever invented. A mix of cheese, garlic, scallions, mayo, butter, and cream cheese baked on good bread:

Soups and a salad

I totally love soups. They change with the seasons, and you can serve them hot, cold, smooth, silky, lumpy, etc. Almost any ingredient can find its way into a soup, and there's so much room for variation.

Zucchini mint soup
I'm not sure why I keep buying zucchini, since it's so disgustingly bland. It grills up okay, and isn't bad sauteed or in pasta, but it has no real virtues that I can think of. Except this one: cold zucchini mint soup. I first had this at Via Matta many years ago, and it was the first time I liked the vegetable. For this version, I also added a handful of basil, a few dollops of Greek yogurt, a squeeze of lemon, salt, pepper, and olive oil.


Tomato, watermelon, cucumber, and goat cheese
aka, variation on this summer's most trendy salad (tomato watermelon and feta). There's a slice each of watermelon and tomato, topped with cucumbers and Tomme de Fleur goat cheese, which is possibly my favorite. It's coated with tarragon, rosemary, and pink peppercorns, among other spices, and has such an elegant balance of tang, creaminess, goatiness, and spice.


Sweet potato soup with chorizo shrimp
We flavored the soup with onion and smoked paprika, and used a chorizo, garlic, and scallion flavored oil to lightly cook the shrimp. Mmmmmmmm. We ate this with a Manzanilla sherry. Double mmmmmmmm.


Hey, a non-pureed soup!
This one has cauliflower, fennel, onion, and carrot. I added a parmesan rind and some prosciutto ends to the broth, along with bay leaf and Italian seasoning. The broth had a great flavor, but the cauliflower was a bit bland. Oh well.

Duck duck...

The last few weeks I've been reading Jeffery Steingarten's "It Must've Been Something I Ate" on the train into work, and it makes me hungry! His essays frequently mention ducks and geese, so I've decided we need to eat more duck (goose is hard to find and much more expensive).
We bought a whole duck the other day ($2.99 a pound at Whole Foods, not too bad). We pan roasted the breast with some five-spice powder, and served it with Chinese chives, five-spice tofu, and hot peppers:


We had a bucket of duck fat in the freezer, and made confit with the legs and wings. For future reference, when you decide to crisp up the skin on duck confit, please use a non-stick pan. This hot mess is the result of all the skin sticking to the pan:

It was super tasty, and we served it on top of cabbage sauteed with onion, coriander seed, mustard seed, and finished with apple cider vinegar.

Seasonal dinner

You can't read the news these days without hearing about local food, carbon footprint, and all that shit. While I'm happy to support local businesses and farms, I'm not convinced that eating "local" is necessarily the best way to live. For example, if you live in New England, does that mean you never eat citrus? What about olive oil, or wine? I suppose Westport Rivers makes great local wines, but wouldn't you want a bit more choice than that? Also, will a local tomato ever beat a canned san marzano tomato at its peak ripeness? If you live in Iowa, are you only allowed to eat corn? Seriously, where do you draw the line?
I don't think I can ever do the real locavore thing. I need ethnic food--Chinese, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Thai, French, everything. That's the best part about food!!! All the crazy ingredients from different cultures, mixing things together, learning about all the foods of the world. How sad to limit yourself to only what comes out of the ground immediately surrounding you! There's got to be some middle ground, right? Where you can support your local farmers, but not limit yourself to potatoes and kale in winter?

In any case, here's a dinner we made including some local ingredients:
Local corn, red peppers, shallots, shiitake, and maitake mushrooms sauteed with butter and olive oil, finished with scallions and basil. Sauteed pork chop with pan jus, and gooseberry sauce (finished with poire william liquor).


We also had a totally non-local cheese plate:
Speck, toscano, morbier, laguiole, roaring 40's blue, and olives


Finished with chunk monkey ice cream.

Ultimate green beans?

I absolutely love green beans. How come they seem so difficult to cook? I've burned them, had them totally raw, flavorless, you name it. I think, after many, many attempts, I've figured out a decent method for making really good green beans.

First, get a pan screaming hot. I mean really f'ing hot. Get some olive oil in there, or some oil that won't light on fire when it's really hot. Throw in the green beans, and toss in some salt. Don't touch them for ~30-45 seconds. Then start stirring and let them brown a bit. After another minute, add about 1/4 cup of water and turn down the heat. Cover for a few minutes to let the green beans cook through. Then, the key ingredients: shrimp paste and cock sauce (no, not THAT kind, you sicko, the chili garlic variety!), and chopped garlic. Let that all cook down for a few minutes, and you're done!

One nice-ish dinner

We've been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to eat lighter meals. We did manage to put together a nice small meal not long ago:

Flan with whipped potato and caviar. The flan was surprisingly successful--2 eggs, ~1/3 can of evaporated milk, salt and pepper blended together. The key was using the hand blender, and not beating extra air into the mix. I tossed in some sauteed shallots, then baked it in a water bath (in the toaster oven!). The egg came out custardy and smooth. We topped it with some mashed potato and some type of fish egg we got as a gift. Really yummy.


Veggie soup "foamed" in the iSi whip. We cooked down red pepper, onion, tomato, garlic, and some broth, then blended it up. For the shrimp, we made a chorizo oil, then slow-cooked the shrimp in the oil. They had an amazing flavor.

Some relatively recent dinners

We've been trying to cook more this summer. It's certainly easier than during the school year, when I eat complete crap most days. I now present a few of our more successful dishes:

Shrimp and mashed potatoes in a garlic cream sauce. We cooked the shrimp in the garlic cream over very low heat. Mmmmmmm.


Cauliflower soup with sauteed ramps.


Pork chop with jicama slaw and mashed potatoes. We recently tried jicama for the first time, and it makes a great refreshing salad.


Thai tomato soup, seasoned with ginger, garlic, coconut, lime, chili garlic sauce, fish sauce, topped with fresh scallions:


Leftover bbq pork, served over polenta with a fried egg and hot sauce.


We had some leftover thai tomato soup, so we lightly poached some cod in it, and garnished with watercress.


More pork chop, with sauteed apples, and an apple celerly root slaw.


One really tasty dessert: grilled white nectarines with melon-ginger-yogurt soup.

Some old LJ posts (2007)

This is about 3 weeks old, but on the first nice weekend of the year, we went to my parents' place to grill.

Shrimp with salt, pepper, olive oil and tons of garlic:


Grilled chicken (marinated with lemongrass, fish sauce, chili garlic sauce, honey, soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger, garlic, and some other stuff I can't remember) and eggplant (just salt, pepper and oil):


Spare ribs (3 hours in a low oven, then finished on the grill for 30 minutes):


(leftovers with bbq sauce and mashed potatoes with peas)

We had leftover spice rub for the ribs, so I marinated some extra chicken thighs with it. The next day, just threw it in the oven topped with some chopped fresh tomatoes....so easy and really tasty:


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Lamb spring rolls. We used the thin-sliced frozen lamb from the Asian market tossed with sesame oil, soy sauce and chili garlic sauce, and some marinated cabbage. On another night, we made more with shredded cucumber instead of cabbage. Yum!


Baby mustard greens sauteed with garlic and black beans


Spaghetti with a sauce of bacon, tuna, peas, onions and tomatoes, finished with a bit of cream:


Cauliflower soup again (chicken broth, water, cream, nutmeg) topped with bacon, carmelized onions, garlic and scallions:


Toasts with wild smoked salmon, cucumber and goat cheese foam. The "foam" was a bit of a disaster...we tried using gelatin with the iSi Whip for the first time, so it was a mix of milk, gelatin and goat cheese. I think we didn't let the mixture chill enough before trying to make the foam, so it deflated instantly. Oh well.


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We started with a roasted beet, scallop and dill goat cheese napoleon, with arugula salad on the side, and beet pureed with balsamic and some water:

The goat cheese was thinned with a bit of milk and mixed with fresh dill, and the scallops were halved and pan seared.

Curried sweet potato soup with yogurt and scallion oil:


We found ramps at Russo's that morning for the first time in 3 years! We cooked them with some bacon and browned butter, served over parmesan risotto:


Originally I wanted to make gnocchi, but that was this week's kitchen disaster. The potato turned to paste as I was mashing it. Yuck.

Asian-style braised pork belly over pickled cabbage (rice vinegar, sugar, salt, long pepper and sesame oil):

We let the cabbage pickle for a few days, and the pork belly braised for ~4 hours. Mmmmmmm fat.

Jason brought a nice light dessert of cantaloupe, raspberry sorbet, passionfruit sorbet and moscato:

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Once again, a few quick weekday dinners:

With the leftover risotto we had from the weekend, we made risotto cakes stuffed with mushroom, ramps and bacon. It was kind of a pain in the ass to form and bread these, but that was basically all the work involved. Sauce was extra stuffing mixed with tomato.



Chinese celery with five spice tofu. So easy and yummy.


Mustard greens with chick peas and kidney beans (canned), and indian spices (cumin, tumeric, chili, cardamom, ginger, garlic and sugar). Served with plain yogurt on the side.


Orchiette with spicy sausage, zucchini and tomato.

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a looooooong time ago, we made this dinner:

Broccoli cheese soup with lots of sharp cheddar on top:


Creamy pasta with bacon and strips of celery root:

This was just okay, not as good as I hoped

Whole striped bass en papillote, with ginger, garlic, lemon grass, thai basil, serrano chilis, red bell pepper, scallion, soy, lime and bourbon:


Possibly the freshest fish I've ever purchased...the thing was flopping around like crazy until the fish guy whacked it on the head

Steamed pork spareribs with black bean and garlic, plated with some brown rice and baby chinese cabbage:

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Food from the last couple weeks:

Baked ziti with green bell peppers, tomatoes, bacon and onions. The base was a bechamel sauce with mozzerella:


Broccoli cooked with garlic and chorizo:


Very flat potato latkes. These were really crispy and good, but I think I like them fatter...mmmmm fat:


Sesame noodles with cabbage and chicken. We marinated the cabbage overnight with soy sauce, lots of rice vinegar, sugar, red pepper flakes and salt. The next day we cooked the chicken with lots of ginger and some soy sauce, then shredded it into the cabbage, and added spaghetti, then doused the whole thing with sesame oil and chili garlic sauce. Yum.


Long peppers: they're like a spicy but less numbing version of a szechuan peppercorn. We had apple slices topped with goat cheese, long pepper and olive oil:


Broccoli rabe with spicy turkey sausage. Kind of boring but tasty:


Chicken stew with mushrooms, carrots, bacon, onion, thyme, red wine and stock. Served over cheesy polenta...sooooo good:


Frisee salad with pistachios, bacon and mustard/sherry vinegar dressing:


Sauteed mustard greens with garlic and mashed potatoes:



From top center to the right are asian pear with fresh goat cheese and long pepper, humboldt fog, and a pyrenees sheep milk cheese with figs soaked in sherry.

We fabricated the duck, and we made confit with the legs and wings. We served it over frisee with dried cherries, pistachios and an orange/mustard dressing:


Then, mushroom soup topped with a chestnut foam (yay iSi whip!). During the afternoon, we put on a big pot of duck and chicken bones for stock, which we used in the soup. Also in the dish are sauteed mushrooms (with garlic, sherry and bacon), crispy shallots, thyme and strips of speck ham:

There was a bit too much going on (in my opinion), but still tasty.

Five spice duck breast with mashed white sweet potato (with ginger and cinnamon) and brussels sprouts with chili garlic sauce and fish sauce. Boy is that fish sauce stinky!


For dessert, my first attempt at creme brulee, this was flavored with earl gray (idea stolen from Eastern Standard)

The custard wasn't as smooth as I hoped, but it tasted good and we got a nice crunchy crust.

To drink, we had a 1999 Zind Humbrecht Riesling, which I thought might be too old, but it was great with the ginger and other spices in the duck. With the mushroom soup with had some oloroso sherry (Osborne).
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Fancy dinner:
We started with fingerling potato skins filled with the potato innards mashed with cream cheese, bacon and scallions:

These were the source of our first kitchen disaster of the day. When we went to fry the skins, we discovered that the oil in the fryer had gone rancid, but not before we stunk up the kitchen with a really nasty smell. Ugh. I made Keith fry up some garlic to try to get rid of the stink :-)

Soup of white sweet potato and apple, topped with vanilla oil and apple skin crisps:

This was the result of our second kitchen disaster! The original plan was to make parsnip and asian pear soup, but it came out horribly bitter. I'm not sure if the pear was bad, or if they just don't cook right. Anyway, we came up with this soup instead, and it was pretty good. The vanilla oil was made with our newly acquired POUND of vanilla beans--less than $20 including shipping! (Jason, please take some away if you want!)

Carbonara made with perciatelli (like very thick spaghetti with a hollow center):


Steak with wilted arugula and mashed potatoes with lots of butter and cream

We picked up this ribeye at Savenor's, and it was probably the nicest piece of meat I've ever purchased. We just seasoned with salt and pepper, then seared the hell out of it in a cast iron pan and finished in the oven.

Finished with bananas foster on vanilla ice cream, but it was devoured too quickly for photos