The last package of pork chops from our freezer pig, brined in sugar and salt and grilled over charcoal. Broccoli rabe from Dunbar Gardens, sauteed in lots of olive oil with sliced garlic and red chile. Soft polenta with butter and parmesan. A quiet evening and a half bottle of Shooting Star Lemberger left over from the night before. The beginning of summer.
Sorry for being such a cruddy blogger this week. The above picture of spaghetti and meatballs is the only food photo I’ve taken in the past week – it’s kinda embarrassing. I made a really tasty Sichuan stirfry of green beans, pork and tofu a few days ago, but completely failed to document it. The mushroom lasagna and the roast chicken, while extremely delicious, have already been thoroughly blogged about. And last night I ate squid in tomato sauce, some sort of roasted meat and a yellow rice pilaf from a buffet in a retirement home (it was the kickoff party for an art show), and it seemed too strange to photograph.
Maybe next week.
Many years ago there was an Indian restaurant in town that really knew its way around a tandoor oven. It closed, of course, leaving us deprived of tandoori chicken and naan. I’ve started experimenting with naan recipes, but I’ve only just gotten around to trying out tandoori chicken at home. Turns out it’s a little tricky.
Various recipes (I consulted a lot) give very mixed messages. Some tell you to use a very hot oven, others to use a regular temperature oven. Others say to grill over the hottest coals you can manage, others to grill on indirect heat. My own thinking at this point is that a tandoor is rather like a pizza oven – extremely high heat, but without direct exposure to the heat source. The chicken is supposed to cook quickly but not burn. We tried grilling our chicken directly over coals and had trouble getting the meat to cook through without completely charring the outside – I think next time we’ll try a longer, slower technique.
The main thing that all the recipes had in common was the yogurt-and garam masala-based marinade (made with yogurt drained of some of its whey), rubbed into de-skinned and heavily slashed chicken pieces. I used a marinade from Sanjeev Kapoor’s new book How to Cook Indian
Despite all the difficulties, it made a great dinner, and some really fantastic chicken sandwiches for several days afterwards. More experimentation is certainly called for – anyone else had good luck doing tandoori at home?
Last weekend was a true taste of summer: sunny, seventies, and mosquitoes. We finally got our patio free of the encrustation of junk (ladders, plant pots, rocks, dishes, ancient bags of fertilizer) and sat outside for dinner for the first time this year. We went to the local farmer’s market and bought asparagus and sweet baby turnips. We made nuoc cham and ate it on Vietnamese spring rolls and Korean pancakes. I pulled rhubarb in the garden and made buttermilk muffins. We drank white wine with a hint of fizz. And we had brunch at Revel. It was a good weekend.
Yet another highly successful recipe from 660 Curries
Bone-in chicken would give the most flavor, but I used boneless skinless chicken thighs (as I often do – they’re easier to take to work as leftovers). A marinade of spices, cilantro and yogurt gave it excellent flavor.
I browned the chicken, took it out of the pan and fried some onions, then added the mixed spinach and mustard greens and used their liquid to scrape up the fond in the pan. The chicken went back in for a long simmer amid the greens. I tried pureeing the greens (minus the chicken) before serving but made the mistake of using the blender instead of the food processor, and nearly exploded the lot. I settled for “pleasantly chunky”, which was still just fine for scooping up with chunks of chicken and fresh Afghan-style naan.
It was a chain reaction. I picked up a copy of Tamasin Day-Lewis’ book Supper for a Song
I managed to find the book shortly afterwards while browsing at Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks in Vancouver (always a good place to look for obscure cookbooks), republished under the title Afghan Food & Cookery. It’s definitely no-frills, but there are some really intriguing dishes in here, including several versions of ash and a hell of a lot of kebabs. I finally tried some recipes out of it last week, and was pleased with the amount of detail in the cooking instructions. The spinach with rhubarb was very successful, the mastawa (sticky rice with lamb and yogurt) more of a mixed result. I want to make both of them again, but possibly with some adjustments.
The spinach dish is a wonderful thing to make at this season, when greens and rhubarb are both at their best. I sliced some leeks, sauteed them in olive oil, then added spinach to the pan and cooked it down. A stalk of rhubarb, cut into pieces, was fried in a little oil and tossed in along with some dried dill. The whole thing cooks down to a rather unappetizing-looking mess, but it’s delicious, the rhubarb adding a quiet tart note that balances the sweetness of the leeks. It reminded me of the Kurdish Rhubarb Braise that we often make in early summer, but it’s much simpler.
Mastawa was much more complicated and time-consuming. I simmered whole lamb shoulder chops with water and onions until the meat fell off the bones, then shredded it by hand. I added washed short-grain rice to the lamb and broth and let it cook, then added soaked orange peel, a can of chickpeas, two whole cups of yogurt and dried dill. It smelled wonderful, but the result was strangely like orange rice pudding – the lamb and onions nearly vanished, and the orange flavor was overwhelming against the blandness of the rice and yogurt. It was very soothing, like congee, and we found a good splash of Sriracha helped a lot to perk it up. I would make this again if I wanted something soft and comforting to eat from a deep bowl in an armchair during the winter, otherwise I would maybe add less rice and a lot more herbs.
I do think it was a successful venture into Afghan cookery. Looking forward to grilling some kebabs and naan!
On Sunday afternoon we drove up to Edison to eat oysters and drink wine, fabulously presented by Slough Food and Les Huitres Volantes (The Flying Oysters). The oysters, from Taylor Shellfish, were cheap and blazingly fresh, the Chablis was chilled and dry, and it wasn’t even raining. We ate ourselves silly. The place was packed and they ran out of oysters. It was fantastic.
Have I mentioned that we love Edison?
My mother has, in the last year, gotten sort of obsessed with arugula pizza, and it’s gradually infected us as well. Tutta Bella makes a particularly good one, which we had recently on a day when my parents and I converged on Seattle. A very simple pizza, it was topped only with prosciutto, a bit of tomato and cheese, with fresh arugula leaves added after cooking so they stayed fresh. When Jon and I stopped by the Dunbar Gardens farmstand last week, that pizza being fresh in my mind, a huge bunch of fresh arugula called out to me and demanded to be made into dinner.
I had been thinking in terms of putting the prosciutto on the pizza before baking it, then adding the greens partway through. But I noticed over on Epicurious that another option is to bake the pizza with nothing but cheese, then add the prosciutto and greens after it comes out of the oven. We tried it, and it was very successful – instead of crisping up, the prosciutto melts softly into the hot cheese, and the arugula perches on top, wilting only slightly where it touches. A little awkward to eat, perhaps, but you can always use a fork to snatch extra leaves off the plate. We ate the leftovers for breakfast the next morning with…yup…a fried egg. Fantastic.
Despite the neverending rain, the lure of the grill has been strong. When we ordered our cow last week, we tried to pick up some steaks to grill for dinner – but the farm is out of steak until the next slaughter. We grabbed the last two packages of thin-cut beef ribs instead, and decided to try making kalbi – Korean-style marinated and grilled beef.
We’ve had lots of versions of kalbi, but hadn’t tried it ourselves yet – the important thing is having the meat thin enough that it fully absorbs the marinade and cooks very quickly. The recipes in our Korean cookbooks used malt syrup for the marinade, which we are temporarily out of, so we pulled a recipe out of our go-to meat cookbook
This was also a great opportunity to eat kim chee, something we’ve gotten wildly fond of in the past year. I’ve been meaning to try making my own, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. In the meantime, we tried a jar of Island Spring kim chee from Vashon Island (a much more local product than I was expecting to find). Following the warning on the label, I opened it in the sink – a very good thing, as the active fermentation in the jar meant that the contents nearly leaped out at me when the lid came off. I set the whole thing in a soup bowl and watched as the top layer of cabbage seethed and bubbled. The taste turned out to be quite mild and pleasantly sour – I would definitely buy this again. But I’m also gonna make my own, for sure.
Grilled scallions were suggested as an accompaniment in the marinade recipe. I love love love grilled scallions, especially with Mexican food – there used to be a local taco wagon that served them – but I hardly ever remember to make them. They are really good – sweet, with a little char. We also cooked up a huge pile of collard greens from the farmer’s market, which made a nice foil for the strong salty flavors of the meat and onions.
Oh, and as usual, the weather was too crappy to eat outside, but thankfully not quite wet enough to stop us from grilling. I am really looking forward to some better weather. Really.
Kalbi (Korean grilled beef)
Adapated from The Complete Meat Cookbook
Combine the soy, sugar, ketchup, garlic, vinegar, oil and red pepper in a zip lock bag. Put in the meat and marinate for at least 2 hours or, preferably, overnight in the fridge. Flip the bag occasionally to make sure everything’s getting coated.
Get the meat out of the fridge about an hour before cooking, to let it warm up. Remove the meat from the bag, leaving as much marinade behind as possible, and grill over medium-hot coals until brown, 3-4 minutes per side. Do not overcook!
Dump the whole scallions into the remaining marinade in the bag, then lay them on the grill and cook until soft. Serve with the ribs, along with rice and kim chee.
We’ve missed the last few Mixology Mondays, for various reasons, but when we saw that May’s theme was floral cocktails (hosted over at The Barman Cometh), we made a special effort to get something together. There are quite a few floral-based cocktails we like, particularly the Deep Blue Sea (violet) and the Vieux Mot (elderflower). We thought it would be fun to come up with something new with one of those flavors, so Jon did some experimenting these last couple of weeks, then wrote this:
As Jessamyn has already mentioned, I recently got a copy of the very fine book Left Coast Libations. While many of the recipes therein have immediately grabbed me, demanding to be made, other recipes have remained more aloof.
Case in point, the Pear Sonata. I’m just not a big fan of dusting a drink with ground cinnamon, and even if I were, there’s no way in hell I’m going to make pear foam. Pear foam? Really?
However, after letting the recipe percolate in my mind for a while, I began to recognize that for all of its weird trappings, the Pear Sonata has good, solid bones to it. Gin, St. Germain, dry vermouth, and lemon juice. Nothing wrong there. What if I were to tweak the proportions a bit, leave off the pear foam (really?), and let the St. Germain shine through? It seemed worth a try.
I began with a base of Bluecoat gin. Bluecoat, made here in the US, has quickly become one of our very favorite gins, with a distinctly citrusy note to it, which I thought would work well with the St. Germain, which I boosted to a full jigger’s worth. Lemon juice and dry vermouth, and in a nod to the original Pear Sonata recipe, just a dash of Clear Creek pear brandy.
A twist of orange to garnish. I find that I have grown very fond of using orange to garnish drinks containing lemon juice – it’s similar enough not to clash, yet different enough to add a little extra dimension to the drink. And as I was about to present it, Jessamyn added her own touch: a single lilac flower.
Elderflower Descant
Shake well with ice and strain. Garnish with a long twist of orange and a lilac flower.
Food on the Brain 