10/13 Bugs Bunny

With all do respect to Heather and everyone else who enjoys the company of rabbits, these little creatures are a great change of pace from chicken (not much more expensive either) and something I used to enjoy often as a kid. Preparation for this particular dish was relatively easy. Basically, I broke down the rabbit into 6 pcs and covered them with mustard and a touch of oil. I let that sit for a couple hours before roasting bugs bunny with some potatoes, celery & carrots in a 425 degree oven for 35 minutes. That's really about it. If you have cream on hand you can make a creamy mustard sauce from the pan drippings and some of the veggies. Unfortunately I used all mine in the chowder yesterday.

10/12 Chowdah

In anticipation of what turned out to be one of the worst Patriots game in quite some time I'd decided to make some clam chowder tonight. I forget when I had made some last, but I didn't quite remember the Garibaldi's recipe I had learned. I think this ended up being relatively close...

I started off by browning some bacon and using the fat to cook some miripoix (onion, carrot, celery) along with oregano, thyme, garlic, salt and pepper. After all that had softened up nicely for 5-10 minutes, I added a few tablespoons of flour to make a roux of sorts and help thicken the eventual soup. I let the flour cook off for 5 minutes and then added the liquids. 'Twas about 1/2 a cup of white wine, a pint of whipping cream, about 1.5 cups of milk and two 8oz bottles of clam juice. Brought everything to a boil to let the flavors meld and added in 3 medium Yukon potatoes, cut up in medium dice. Cooked those on low heat till just soft, 15-20 minutes, and added about 2 cups of chopped up cooked clams. These were pre-cooked, though not canned, but you could replace with canned or fresh - depending on who you're trying to impress. Don't cook the clams too long though or theyll get tough and chewey. Add the bacon back in and that's about it. Now if only the Pats had held up their end of the bargain this would've felt much more successful. Oh well...

10/09 Pasta with Butternut Squash

On the verge of going out to get fried chicken for dinner, I decided to fight the craving and stay home instead. After sifting through the pantry, I ended up cooking myself another recipe from Bittman's blog. For you loyal readers with an amazing memory, you'll note that this is very similar to something Heather put together almost exactly one year ago! That too was inspired by Mark, though it was a tad bit more complicated.

The recipe is relatively simple. It's just some finely chopped/grated butternut squash, cooked slowly and mixed in with pasta. Pretty straight forward, though I was mostly just intrigued by what it would taste like. Note that the food processor did a great job with the squash - something I was initially a bit concerned about. I also did make my own pasta while the "sauce" cooked, since there wasn't really much else to the recipe and I hadn't made a batch in a couple weeks.

As for the taste? Well I guess pretty much what you'd expect... It actually goes really well together and if you like butternut squash I can't imagine someone not liking this. One suggestion a reader made on Bittman's blog was that the recipe would benefit quite well from a little fresh sausage and sage. I couldn't agree more and may try this in the near future since I now have half a butternut squash left.

10/8 Risotto Cakes

Inspired by a recent post on Mark Bittman's blog, I made a ton of mushroom risotto the other night for dinner. It was a pretty basic risotto with some not so home-made stock and some formerly dried shiitake mushrooms. All things considered, 'twas pretty good the first time around. Rather than nuking it today for the second go 'round, I decided to make some risotto cakes out of what was left. As I'm sure you can see, I did use a mold, but this could easily be done without one. I seared them in some butter (as recommended in Harold McGee's latest article to minimize stickiness) and served the three "cakes" with some lightly dressed greens. All in all, a rather successful meal.

10/05 Stuff in a Jar

Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to cook and go to business school at the same time. However, I have not determined whether it is possible to cook, attend school and blog all at once. Here is my first true attempt. I'll keep it short since I have some stupid assignments to attend to after this.

So... stuff in a jar. When you're busy, the best thing to do is to make lots of extra food and have plenty of leftovers later. Stews, soups, chilis and roasts are perfect for this. Another idea is to can things and keep them even longer - ideally a couple weeks or more. Hence stuff in a jar... Here are three examples:

1) Yogurt. I've been making yogurt since early September - so just about a month now - and I'm still using the original bacteria culture I started with. In the process I've rediscovered a simple thing from my youth: Plain yogurt and sugar. Yumm. I think this'll keep at least a week in the fridge, probably longer. Oh and yogurt machines (incubators) cost as little as $15.

2) Apple sauce. I bought a bunch of apples recently that were starting to go soft. Apple sauce is an easy way to extend their shelf life for at least a week - maybe more. This is key when you're poor and can't afford to be wasting apples left and right. Apples, water & sugar is all you need.

3) Pickles. I want to learn how to make pickles. I've tried before and kindda failed (ie taste wasn't quite right). My latest attempt is with some random recipe found online, we'll see how it works out. It's just a quick pickling which will be ready in a few days and wont keep more than a week or two when done. It think it's a step in the right direction though.

8/23 Evanston Farmer's Market

not feeling particularly well today thanks to my new classmates and their tequila drinking habits. in any event i decided to walk it off by going to the farmer's market this morning. when i arrived last week, i was pleasantly surprised to find out that the evanston farmer's market is only a couple blocks away from the house. so, at least through october, i wont have to rely on whole foods for my food. the market is actually quite large - they claim to have about 30 vendors - and seems very popular, always a good thing to see. the farmers seem to come from pretty far away, michigan and indiana for example, though some are more local. unfortunately i couldn't buy much of anything since i'm leaving on a big jet plane tomorrow. i did pick up a few tomatoes and some arugula to enjoy for lunch however. overall, i couldn't be happier to have this essentially next door. good news for me!

8/22 Cajun Shrimp&Bacon Ravioli

my fridge and pantry are still rather empty as i fill out the kitchen. however i did have some bacon and frozen shrimp on hand and so decided to make full use of the herbs and spices in the pantry. i made a quick tomato pasta dough (1 egg, 3/4 flour and a squirt of tomato paste per serving) and rolled it out to make some ravioli. i've determined fresh pasta is actually easier to make for one person than for multiple people since the amount of time it takes to make is directly proportional to the size of the group. in any event, for the filling i cooked up a couple slices of bacon - not too crisp - and whizzed that together with some defrosted shrimp, cooked onions&celery, and what amounted to a cajun spice mix. this already looked and smelled delicious. then i just put the ravioli together using a little egg wash to bind the two sides of the pasta dough together. Nothing tricky here, you just need to avoid overfilling the raviolis.

at this point i realized i had way too much of the filling and decided to mix in some of the egg wash and bread crumbs into it. this allowed me to make a small cajun shrimp and bacon cake of sorts. fried that up to golden crispy goodness and made a little chipotle-lemon mayo to serve along side. the pasta was topped simply with some good olive oil, fleur de sel and parseley.

8/20 southwest-like corn + potato soup

not sure what the inspiration was here, but i had some corn and potatoes and thought to myself - southwest! the end result didn't exactly taste like something you might find in albuquerque, but it was pretty good none the less. started off sweating some onions/celery/jalapenos in olive oil seasoned with coriander seeds/lemon/pepper/salt/ancho chili powder/bay leaf. let that go for a while while i cut up three yukon golds into medium sized cubes and added them to the pot. covered the whole thing with a chicken broth and let the potatoes get all soft. before adding the fresh corn and kidney beans i gave the potatoes a proper mashin' to get everything all gooey-like. then i let everyone get acquainted in the pot while i pondered what was missing. ideally a squirt of lime and cilantro, but a spoon of yogurt and parsley did the dirty work tonight. finished everything off with some fresh ground pepper for a surprisingly heather-like meal. my favorite part was crunching into the occasional corriander seed - i definitely need to play with this flavor some more.

8/8 Smoked Brisket

Since I'll finally be getting my own kitchen back in just a couple days (for the first time since the end of April), I figured it's high time we get this blog up and running again. Now I'll certainly have to adjust my cooking to a slightly reduced budget and more importantly an unpredictable schedule. Plus I'll have to find out where all the good food stores are... But that should all make it that much more fun. In any event, for now I'm still in Boston and feeding the entire family, so here we go...

So this one was quite simple, though time intensive. I started off by looking through recipes to gather some ideas on how to smoke this half brisket. Here are a few conclusions I drew:

1) Virtually every recipe uses a spice rub, however not a single spice rub mix is the same.
2) Most recipes suggest refrigerating the brisket overnight with the rub on it. Probably helps, but I've decided it's not critical.
3) Some Texans like to put an open can of beer in the smoker in order to provide humidity. Seems like a waste of a perfectly good beverage to me.
4) Internal temperature needs to come up to about 180 or so for the brisket to be done however cooking times and temps were all over the board and my grill doesn't have an internal thermometer anyway.
5) Some recipes say to flip the brisket while cooking, others say not to. For obvious reasons, I chose the latter option.

With that in mind I made a spice rub which I could not duplicate if you paid me to - essentially taking whatever spices from the spice cabinet that seemed like they could be tasty. Cinnamon, curry, paprika, chile, cumin, coriander, garlic powder, salt, pepper, cayenne, oregeno are the ones that I can remember right now - there were at least a few more.

Now apparently some people have "smoke boxes" for their wood chips. I'm not sure what a smoke box is, but I'll bet it's roughly cube shaped and allows smoke to escape. Since I do have aluminum foil however, I made a little aluminum tray for the hickory wood chips. Now I paid 3.99 for a small bag of Weber chips at Whole Foods. That probably means I got ripped off 4 times over. It also means that wood chips are cheap, so don't be afraid to use them. (A small bag is enough for 2-3 smoking "sessions")

After soaking the chips 30 minutes, I got them smoking on the right side of the gas grill (burner on low) and placed the rubbed brisket on the second shelf of the left side of the grill (burner turned off). Why the second shelf? I don't have an answer. Seemed like a good idea. I also placed a can of water on the second shelf to provide humidity. I'm skeptical that this did anything, but if the Texans do it, it must be good... Finally I placed the thermometer probe into the beef to help me figure out when it was ready and that's pretty much it folks. After that it's just wait and drool for four hours.

As I'm sure you can tell from the pictures, the final product was rather delicious. Sure there's room for improvement, but I'd happily eat this on a daily basis! Oh and I know you're all wondering whether that second picture makes a great desktop wallpaper. Well it does.

5/5 Shrimp and Beet Tacos

So admittedly, I haven't posted nearly as much as I'd hoped I would. There always seems to be a good reason, but recently, it was because I was trying to kill off most of my pantry items before moving out of Davis Square. As a result, most of my dishes were pretty boring and not very inspired. I'll be traveling for a couple months now, so obviously it'll be quite hard to cook anything, though if I do - and I will seek out opportunities to cook whenever possible - I will post them up here. For now I made some pretty original tacos for Cinco de Mayo - I think so anyway! The main ingredient was roasted shrimps with cayenne, pineapple, onions, cilantro and oregano. I also made a raw beet and lime slaw, some guacamole and green tomatillo salsa - all to be wrapped in a nice soft shell corn tortilla. I guess the beets were really the only original item in this dish, but I thought it worked really well and the beets add an amazing color to the dish.

3/24 Shepherd's Pie

So what happens when you cook a 5lb+ leg of lamb for 3 people? Well you have leftovers of course! And what do you do with slow cooked leg of lamb?!? Well, you already read the title above, so yes, you make shepherd's pie.

Now, I'm pretty sure a lot of you have already heard my rant about shepherd's pie. If not, here it goes: IF A RESTAURANT TRIES TO SELL YOU SHEPHERD'S PIE COOKED WITH BEEF, RUN AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE TOWARDS THE NEAREST EXIT. It's really quite simple... Shepherds care for sheep. Sheep in turn provide wool, milk and meat among other things. Cowherds care for cows. Cows and sheep are different. If you want a Cowherd's Pie, by all means order one, I'm sure they're tasty. But if you order a shepherd's pie - at the very least, you should expect to be eating lamb soon thereafter...

So anyway, I cooked the lamb with diced onion, chopped garlic, quartered cremini mushrooms, frozen peas, white wine, tomato sauce, fresh thyme and salt/pepper while I prepared some mashed potatoes (2 russets did the trick). Once both were done, I topped the lamb ragu with mashed potatoes and cheese and baked the whole thing in the oven for 25 minutes at 400 degrees. Now I used Gruyeres instead of some sort of lame British cheese and I used homemade tomato sauce in my "ragu" whereas traditionally you would just use stock... Thus my pie is not quite a real shepherd's pie, but at least I DIDN'T USE BEEF DAMN IT!!

So there you go. This wasn't as good as yesterday's lamb & flageolets dinner, but it wasn't far off and it's a great example of how you can turn leftovers into something quite tasty.

Oh, one last thing. If, for some dumb reason, you drop your chef knife -- don't try to catch it with your leg. The results will tend to fall somewhere between less-than-ideal and horrific. Additionally, this can, and probably will, delay the enjoyment of your dinner.

3/23 Easter Leg of Lamb

Cooked up some lamb this weekend for Easter. Followed two recipes that I’ve used in the past, and they worked just as well as in the past. First the lamb. This one came out of Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. It’s the “seven hour leg of lamb.” Just like it sounds, you basically cook the leg of lamb at a low temp (300 degrees) for 7 hours in a sealed cooking vessel of some sort. Before it goes in, you stuff it with slivers of garlic and throw in a few carrots and onions, white wine and herbs for good measure. Cover, bake and voila! Essentially you get confit leg of lamb that falls off the bone.

Traditionally in France, lamb is often served with flageolets beans. These are essentially small premature kidney beans that once cooked are creamy and delicious. For these I followed a Thomas Keller recipe out of his Bouchon cookbook. Essentially, you quick-soak these by bringing them to a boil and letting them sit for an hour, then you cook them for 2-3 hours with aromatics – but no salt (this apparently toughens the beans). Then you finish them in butter, salt/pepper, thyme and comfit garlic… like I said, very creamy and tasty. (btw it's worth clicking on the picture to make it bigger if you don't do this anyway!)

While we're at it...

3/20 Clams and Chinese Sausage

I do like clams and these are no exception. Started this off by sauteeing an onion and some celery with some La Chang chinese sausage in olive oil. After a few minutes I added some clam juice I had left over from I dunno what. After that evaporated and the onions were nice and soft I threw in some garlic sambal (chili sauce) to balance off the sweetness from the sausage and a few large glugs of white wine. Brought everything to a boil and added the Mahogany Clams from Maine. I find these to be a great bargain at $5.99 for a whole bag at Whole Foods. Closed the lid and waited for them to start popping open. At that point, it's just like waiting for popcorn and I started drooling. As they opened i took them off the heat one at a time so they wouldn't get chewy. You've gotta love animals that have built in timers - brilliant!. Once they were all out, added a heaping tablespoon of creme fraiche and served it all up with some tasty bread. mmmm mmmm good!

3/8 Pizza Night

So Haskell had the grand idea to make pizza last night. Pepperoni just wasn't going to cut it, so we made a quick trip to Fromagio Kitchen in Cambridge, where we found a few top-notch toppings. We bought some fancy pants fontina cheese, some brown clamshell (honshimeji) mushrooms, fresh mozzarella and basil. We then took our toppings one step further - as I tend to do with these things - and picked up some duck prosciutto and some lardo. Now lets talk about how good those two things are. Duck prosciutto... Had it a couple weeks ago at Central Kitchen and loved it. 'Twas just as amazing this time. Each slice is about equal proportion cured fat and meat. This particular version had a good amount of black pepper on it too. And lardo??? I've actually never had the stuff before... well not when it's just "lardo." Basically its just pork back fat, cured like prosciutto and sliced thinly. So essentially, it's like eating the fat from prosciutto. I can't tell you how good this is.

So onto the cooking. Haskell made the dough while I started preparing some stuff to snack on. Some olives, ciabatta, olive oil, mimolette cheese and the aforementioned lardo. We also cracked open a 1985 Vosnes Romanee, a red burgundy that had aged wonderfully. So clearly, we were off to a good start...

Ok, onto the pizzas. The first one was pretty basic but very well executed by Haskell. We started off pretty simply with mozzarella, previously home-made tomato sauce, basil and fontina. We noticed the dough was lacking salt, but otherwise a flawless pie. Oh, and at this point Dave came over to help with the eating – lest you think that two people could eat all this food alone.

Onto the second pizza. Things got a bit more creative here. Toppings included duck prosciutto, ricotta, fontina, slivers of green olives, and lightly dressed arugula on top of everything after the pizza came out of the oven. The duck was crisped up like bacon, the ricotta was nice and sweet and the arugula had its characteristic pepperiness. Very tasty.

Pizza three... clamshell mushrooms, tomato sauce, fontina and basil. The mushrooms were lightly sautéed before being added to the pizza and had a nice bite to them. We're starting to be quite full now, not helped by the fact that Dave is now watching Roadhouse on the TV - not a movie that one should watch while eating.

Final pizza... ricotta, olives, lardo and tomato sauce. we we're stuffed by now and probably didn’t really appreciate this one. The lardo mostly melted into the pizza which was definitely not a bad thing. By the end of the night, we had eaten all but two of the slices, which if you do some math is a lot of pizza. Anyway, the best pizza of the night? In my opinion, the duck prosciutto was the winner - but I'm not sure what the others thought. In any event, besides the whole over-eating thing, I would say it was a pretty successful evening.

3/7 Mushroom and Olive Ravioli

I can't believe it's almost been two weeks since I last posted. Truth be told, I've actually been cooking quite a bit - but for the most part I've just been making fresh pasta. I think I've made it 4 or 5 times in the last two weeks - spaghetti, paprika linguine, pepper papperdelle and tonight - ravioli. I thought I'd post this one cause it was quite tasty. Again, from start to finish (including eating) this all took 1.5hours. I even had time to bake banana bread while the pasta dough was resting.

So for the filling I used fresh ricotta, green olives, mushrooms and thyme. Delicious! A bit of olive oil and parm on top and thats it. There's really not much more to say, other than everyone should start making fresh pasta if they haven't already. Time for some banana bread!

2/25 Soy Poached Mackerel and Pickled Celery Root

I'm working a little outside my comfort zone on this one. Yesterday I bought a mackerel fillet at the Japanese grocery store. I decided to poach the mackerel in a soy/marin (japanese cooking wine) broth and made a very thinned out mayonnaise sauce with sambal (chili paste) and yuzu (asian lemony citrus). The fact that it didn't really ever thicken up was my fault, but in the end worked quite well with the fish and wasn't too heavy. According to my unhappy roommates the result was that the entire house smelled really bad (to me it just smelled like soy... but whatever).

Along with the fish I made some "pickled" celery root. It's really just celery root cooked in just a bit of slightly sweet lemon broth. Not really a pickle, but it cut through the fattiness of the fish nicely.

I also started some "real" brined pickles which should be ready in a weeks time or so... never made those before either, so we'll see how they turn out.

2/19 Salmon Tomliatelle

Question: You've got an egg, some left over fish and an hour to cook dinner - what do you do? An omelet? Nah, that just won't cut it tonight. So with a little inspiration from old friend Jamie Oliver here's my solution to the problem.

I got home from work at 5:45. After taking off my jacket I immediately mixed 3/4 cup flour with an egg. I added in a squirt of tomato paste and a heap teaspoon (as Jamie would say) of fresh ground pepper. I gave it a whirl in the mini-cuisinart for 45 second and formed a dough. Some would call this a pasta dough. I let the dough rest 45 minutes in a covered bowl, which apparently develops the glutens or something technical like that. After 45 minutes I brought my water to a boil and started running the dough through the pasta machine. This takes just under 10 minutes - and I'm pretty bad at it. Miraculously, in that time the (well-salted) water had just come to a boil. I cut the pasta sheets into thickish strips. Tagliatelle? I'm not sure. I prefer to call them tomliatelle (because there's tomato in them of course).

In any event, I dunked my pasta in the water and quickly made a sauce - butter, parseley, capers, anchovies, yuzu (more on this another day - but it's an asian citrus fruit like a very flowery lemon) and the leftover steamed salmon from last night. Nothing here needs to cook - so 2 minutes on high heat was sufficient to melt the butter. Turns out this is exactly how long the pasta needed too - crazy how these things work out! Once done, everything was combined onto one glorious plate. Tomato-pepper tomliatelle and salmon. BAM! Parmesan? Nah... call me old-school but a drizzle of olive oil is the only other thing this dish needed.

Dinner was served at 6:43.

chicken a la delicious

Not sure what to call this one. It was inspired from a few different sources and came out pretty well. I think we'll work up from the bottom. First, a base of.... polenta! Nothing fancy here, just some salt, pepper, olive oil and.... polenta!! Go figure! On top of that we have a Zuni Cafe radicchio and parseley salad with bread crumbs, anchovy vinaigrette, and a grated boiled egg? yup, grated. Apparently Judy Rodgers knows what she's doing. Next up we have the hero of the night - roasted chicken with a parmesan/breadcrumb coating. "This reasonably slowly roasted chicken was butterflied and baked with tender love and care." Sorry, just practicing my marketing skills... As it turns out, despite being Italian, parmesan ain't half bad. And finally, to pull everything together, we have baked onions and bacon which provided a nice cushion for the chicken to roast on and an even better topping. I did not need inspiration for the bacon... All in all, i think this dish deserves a solid A-. Very tasty stuff.

2/4 Vancouver: Guu!

Guu with Garlic... or maybe its Garlic Guu... I'm honestly not sure what this place is actually called, but it pretty much wrapped up the best day of eating ever. This is one of three related Izakaya restaurants in Vancouver. In short this is a Japanese tapas restaurant - but really, it's so much more.

Unlike the last meal, when I felt like Rachel Ray getting advice from the host at Salt (see below); this time, I felt like Anthony Bourdain, eating more food than one would think possible in a single sitting, while drinking my fair share of sake and simply taking in all the craziness around me for two solid hours.

When you first walk in to Guu, the first thing you notice is the noise. I literally felt dizzy after 5 minutes while waiting for a seat and had to step outside for a bit. It's loud. Every single order is yelled out by every member of the staff from one corner of the dining area to the back of the kitchen. Actually it's not just the orders... every time someone enters or leaves the room, sits, gets up or is brought a dish - it's announced by the entire staff. To be perfectly honest, this actually cut my appetite at first. You really have to experience it to understand how loud it can get. However, after a few shots of sake, this all becomes very enjoyable.

Anyways, on to the food. After I sat down at the end of the bar, my appetite quickly returned. I started off with an order of Ocha-Zuke (a Japanese rice porridge of sorts) and an order of Ton-Tore (salt cooked pork cheeks with a ponzu sauce and daikon). Both were excellent. The Ocha-Zuke was topped with Salmon and seaweed while the pork cheeks were very tender and extremely flavorful - kindda like the best pork chop you could imagine and then maybe a bit better than that.

When I'd made my way through those, I quickly ordered the Kaki-Mayo-Yaki (baked oysters with spicy cod roe, corn, and mayonnaise served in the shell) which were amazing. The oysters themselves were good, but the dish as a whole really puts any other baked oyster dish to shame. Really, really, good.

Before I was done with the two oysters, I had the courage to order Agedashi-Dofu (deep fried tofu in a soy based broth topped with spicy cod roe, green onions, and dried seaweed). Now anyone who knows me realizes this is very uncharacteristic. The reason I opted to go with the dofu was simple: the chowhound post that had directed me to Guu in the first place had described this dish as a highlight despite the diner's ambivalence towards tofu. As it turns out - they were right. This was great. I didn't think it was possible, but I really, really enjoyed the tofu. The broth was very salty and the fried tofu was a perfect contrast. Really great.

I was on a roll now and couldn't give up just yet. I had room for one more dish. And so in came the sweet shrimp sashimi. Fantastic. Actually, better than fantastic. These were ridiculously fresh and whatever it was that I sucked out of the heads was so sweet and briny I could have easily eaten ten more. There's no way I can do these justice so I'll just say that contrary to what others may have written once upon a day, you can have great seafood on Mondays.

So there it is - a truly tremendous meal. Memorable, simple, inspired and inspiring. Everything a meal should be.