transmute leftovers to takeout

I had leftover slices of eye round, leftover fresh noodles, as well as onions, scallions, and bean sprouts. We made pho on Tuesday, but since Ryan made the broth, it was mostly an assembly meal, so I didn't post about it. I thought about making the noodles into a lo mein style thing when I was eating them on Tuesday, since the texture was very nice. I'd definitely get the same noodles again, they were terrific in the pho and perfect for this dish as well. I think they were Wang brand, which makes them even better.

I picked up some celery and mushrooms on the way home, but didn't end up using the mushrooms, since my sister was going to be partaking. They would have been delicious, however, so I will not where I would add them. I couldn't find shiitake, but fresh shiitake would be ideal, and crimini would be lovely as well.

I heated up a mix of oil (half and half vegetable and an extra peppery olive with a splash of sesame) over pretty high heat in my giant sauce pan (a stir fry pan would be good too). Once it started popping, threw in the chopped celery and onions (red, from the pho). Once they'd softened a bit, I pushed them over to the side and did the sliced eye round (salted and peppered, easy on the salt) in batches, just browning it and then moving it into the pile of aromatics. Once all the meat was in, I added mirin, soy sauce, leftover scallions and bean sprouts, as well as a ton of coarse ground black pepper and some garlic powder (I was lazy, but if I weren't I'd have put fresh in with the beef). I stirred and let it simmer while I put the noodles in the boiling water. Add a bit more soy sauce, sesame oil, black pepper and other seasonings to taste (red pepper flakes or chili sauce if you want some heat). If you want to do it exactly like me, you need to stop paying attention to the noodles just before they're about to boil over, and make a terrific mess of your stove. Ideally, you skip that step, but it seems to happen very quickly, and the fresh noodles are done in a couple of minutes tops. Turn everything off, and transfer the noodles (I used tongs, resulting in more mess) to the pan with the sauce. Basically, you're treating it like you would Italian pasta, you want it to still be hot and still have a decent amount of pasta water on it. Toss it to combine, and the pasta should soak up a good amount of the liquid, and what remains should combine with the pasta water and be thick and lovely and covered with veggies and beef. It should look pretty much exactly like takeout lo mein, only fresher.

For a pound and a half of meat and two pounds of fresh noodles, I used about half an onion, four (six?) celery stalks, two scallions, and about a cup of bean sprouts. Maybe a quarter cup of mirin, and about half a cup of soy sauce, added as two separate quarter cups. Sesame oil was splashes, pepper was grind until my hand got tired, and maybe a teaspoon or two of garlic powder.

experiments in cooling beverages

It is now well into iced tea season. I usually consume about 1-3 mugs (my mug is a bit larger than a pint, apparently, so saying 2-3 cups is misleading) of tea a day during the cooler months. I usually use a bit of skim milk and one teaspoon of organic sugar per giant mug. I am a fairly warm blooded person. Some of my friends have compared my thermal output to volcanoes and other such phenomena. So once it gets warm (by which I mean over 70 degrees), I start drinking iced tea instead. I usually have a gallon pitcher in the fridge, and have a small half gallon pitcher that I use for non-standard tea. I like my tea a little bit sweet, and since sugar is a pain to integrate with cool beverages, I've been experimenting with simple syrups. I've made ginger syrup (used it on fruit salad, but it was delicious with black tea as well), lime syrup (for mojito inspired tea), but a happy accident was what led me to make some vanilla syrup. I have a tub of sugar into which I put all the used vanilla pods and some older pods that got a bit tried out. This subtly infuses the sugar with vanilla. This tub was nearly out of sugar, and I was trying to get a cup out of it, and accidentally ended up with some vanilla pod bits in the syrup. I left them in there, and the flavor intensified a good bit in the syruping process. It is quite delicious in black tea, and I've been repeating the accident since.

Some other experiments I'd like to try include barley tea, which is apparently very popular in Japan, and more with green teas. Most of the iced green tea I make and purchase seems to have a woody or smoky flavor, which I'm not fond of. It's not bad, and in most commercial applications its usually covered with excessive sweetness. I'm trying shorter brew times with more bags, and it seems to mitigate it a bit.

I didn't forget to update last week, I did beer brats again. The only thing I did differently was grilled some onions to go with them. Skewers through the slices made them really easy to handle, and they were quite delicious. I should say something about the red bean paste I made, but that's for another post.

chicken wedding soup

Just realized I never posted this.

I've been feeling a bit sick, so there was no Tuesday night dinner this week, but in an attempt to make myself feel better, I made soup. The goal was a fusion between Italian wedding soup and chicken noodle soup.

I made mire poix, sweat it with a good bit of salt and pepper, and then added enough chicken stock to mostly fill the pot. Once it had heated through, I added a bunch of herbs and two medium sized potatoes that I'd diced to about a quarter inch. I made chicken meatballs (ground chicken, bread crumbs, an egg, salt, pepper) while those cooked, and tossed them in once the potato was soft enough. After about twenty minutes, I added a bunch of torn up broccoli rabe, since I couldn't find kale. I honestly can't recall what herbs I tossed in, but several varieties of thyme featured pretty heavily.

It was quite tasty, and I ate it for the rest of the week and felt much better.

[TND] 5.20 Grilled Salmon with Tzatziki Sauce

I had a good bit of the cucumber, mint, dill and yogurt sauce leftover from a re-creation of the last Tuesday night dinner this weekend, and was trying to think of a way to use it up. My first thought was actually lamb kebabs, grinding the lamb with spices and pistachios and forming it around skewers, sort of a mini version of the spinning stick. But I didn't have luck finding stew lamb last week, so I decided to go with salmon.

Interestingly, the farmed salmon and wild caught salmon were about four cents difference in price, and lying right next to each other in the case. The difference in color is pretty stark, with the farmed salmon being this pale, sickly orange and the wild caught a more vibrant reddish-orange. It's also, in general, a good idea to avoid farmed salmon, as farmed salmon is often treated with pesticides and antibiotics, isn't really sustainable and can spread disease to wild fish populations. But the color is really something I've been trying to pay more attention to, not just in fish, but in pretty much all meats.

My initial plan was to crust the salmon and pan roast it, but I bought more salmon than would fit in my pan, so I moved it the grill. I still crusted it with the same spices: salt, pepper, sate seasoning from Penzey's, and cayenne pepper. I made a cucumber and feta salad with mint and dill and sweet onion, and roasted some potatoes to with it. Simple and delicious.

I've been watching a lot of Jamie at Home, a recent series by Jamie Oliver which is probably the best food tv I've ever seen. It's basically him, in rural Essex, with a ginormous organic garden and him making dishes featuring things from said garden. I really enjoy the way he cooks in general. The second season of his first show was airing while I was studying in England, having to feed myself for real for the first time, and his food was simple, accessible and grounded in very generalizable techniques. The style, the idea that food can be a bit messy and needs to be fun, is something that's really stuck with me. This new show combines that with beautiful ingredients, and it really works. So I'm inspired to make some things from the show, in particular, to get more familiar with the pasta machine Dave got me. He made it look very quick, probably as easy as going to the freezer to get a package of pasta, and that's a place I'd like to be.

[TND] Fell behind again

I am bad at blogging. Reliably. Reliably modifies both bad and blogging.

Shortly after the last time I posted, we had a passover seder, after which we skipped the next Tuesday night dinner. I made creme brulee, and the salt crusted beets mentioned earlier. They came out quite lovely, and the creme fraiche horseradish sauce was amazing, especially with the beets. I would like to do more with beets, I feel like they're underrated and delicious.

We also had a BYOM(eat) celebration to mark the end of semester and my probable future employment. I made some steak au poivre, which I later replicated (sort of) for mother's day. The first time I did it right, grinding the pepper with the mortar and pestle, the second time I did it with a small food processor. The result was very very fine pepper dust, which had a much more intense pepper flavor on the meat. Much more intense. Filed it away as something potentially useful, but not for au poivre with good meat.

Prior to that, I made a gourmet-ed version of chicken fried steak. I was looking for, but unable to find, skirt steak, so I used a cut of meat Highland Park has been carrying, called southwestern fillet. It's a shoulder cut, it's sort of halfway between flank and tenderloin and priced similarly to flank. It's a great cut, I've gotten for a number of uses and been very happy with it. I made sausage cream gravy, whipped potatoes, and some sort of vegetable which was purely ancillary to the meat and gravy.

Ryan made a beef and mushroom risotto two weeks back, which was quite delicious. I made the banana-caramel bread pudding to go with it, which were really simple, really tasty, and will be added to the default dessert rotation. I will take the time to make my own caramel sauce next time, because store bought is generally flavored corn syrup, which is the opposite of yummy.

Last Tuesday I intended to make lamb, but was unable to find reasonably priced lamb of an appropriate cut to make kebabs out of. So I used some chicken and beef, covered generously with cumin and paprika. I also made flatbread from a recipe in the most recent Fine Cooking, done on the grill. It came out wonderfully, and is something I'll repeat often, as it was very easy and versatile. I made cucumber (leech the moisture like you would eggplant), dill, mint yogurt sauce to top these little Mediterranean tacos, along with red onion, cucumber, and tomato. Gotta use the full fat yogurt, none of that low fat stuff, and a good dollop of creme fraiche really brings the sauce together. I actually have a good bit of sauce leftover from this weekend, so I may try to find some lamb to grind up into a sort of doner kebab for this week, but last week doesn't inspire confidence.

I also made pie. I'm getting better with the crusts, but baking seems to be pretty fundamentally alien to my style of cooking. Measuring is for the birds. I made a strawberry-rhubarb-mango pie, which was quite delicious. You don't see rhubarb and mango together, probably because the places you can get good rhubarb you by definition get horrible mangoes and places where you can get good mangoes you probably just don't get rhubarb. It's too bad, because it is a fantastic combination, the tart rhubarb and the smooth sweet mango.

things I should make

I subscribe to two cooking magazines, both of which I enjoy very much. Fine Cooking and Bon Appetit, two very different magazines, both of which I like to pick and choose bits and pieces from, as well as draw inspiration. I often times will read them when they arrive, think "ooo, I should make that and that and that and that." Then I put them down, and when Tuesday rolls around, I think "wow, I have no idea what to make."

So here's a list of ideas, some from the magazines, some from random places.

Dinners

Cuban burgers (chorizo and ground pork patties, possibly marinated, on sweetened buns with pickles and mustard and swiss. And possibly cappicola, 'cause it's awesome)

Peppered beef stroganoff (Jan BA) (creme fraiche, how can you go wrong?)

Middle eastern bison meatballs with cilantro-yogurt sauce (Feb BA) (this is what we call a "targeted" recipe)

Salt crusted beets with horseradish creme fraiche (Feb BA) (sounds neat, and it's fun to rhyme with beet)

Pasta with peas, cream, parsley and mint (Feb BA) (fresh!)

Lamb burgers with gyro fixings (haven't done them in a while)


Desserts

Caramel banana bread puddings (Jan BA)

Pomegranate panna cotta (Feb BA)

Lemon souffles with boysenberries (Mar BA)

[TND] 3.4 Burgers, Oven Fries, Roasted Veggies and Cocunut Pudding

Oh, and crab cakes. Or "laborcakes", as those actually making them came to call them. They were quite tasty, so it was definitely worth the extra effort on someone else's part. The recipe was one of Emeril's, but we pretty much modified it to things we had access to and eliminated steps that we didn't feel like doing. We used my new pan on the new stove, and it was magical. I need to deep fry more things, I think.

There's not much to say about burgers. Good meat, seasoned aggressively with kosher salt and nothing else, not over-handled, and they will be fantastic. I heard a suggestion for Cuban burgers involving ground chorizo and the typical cuban sandwich fixings, we may be seeing those sometime in the near future.

I grilled asparagus, but also some radicchio. It was very interesting, I'll definitely be playing with it some more in the future.

Finally, I made a very simple coconut pudding from Bon Appetit. It was quite delicious and could very easily sustain some heartier spices, like cardamom. My mom got me some vanilla suspension, which seems to be the inside of vanilla beans suspended in some sort of syrup, and it's basically like having vanilla beans you can use with a teaspoon. I predict creme brulee in the future.