Everyday Yumminess: Perfect Strawberry Shortcake

When I little, my birthday cake every year was Strawberry Shortcake. I think this was due in part to my aversion to the (nasty) sweetened coconut that decorated so many kids' cakes, but also in part to having a June birthday, when strawberries are irresistible. My mom can maybe chime in in the comments to let us know if it was also due in part to the love of a certain cartoon character... (Cool-Emily hopes not, but Dork-Emily wouldn't be surprised...) I'd never made Strawberry Shortcake before, but I'm planning to make it for friends next month and figured I'd better practice. I turned to Smitten Kitchen, because the good blogger over there has yet to let me down, and this recipe was no exception... The best part is that it's a super-simple food processor dough, so even a reluctant baker like me can succeed easily. The only odd thing about the dough is the use of hard boiled egg yolks rather than eggs. I guess this is to keep there from being too much liquid? I don't know, but the shortcakes rocked, so apparently it works...
Into the dry ingredients go some cold (Amish) butter and some (optional) lemon zest. I used a bit more zest than was called for, and ended up with a really nice lemon accent that I do not regret...
A little cream is added, and a bit of pulsing transforms the mixture into a dough...
The dough is patted out into a 3/4" - 1" thick round which you're supposed to cut into wedges, but which I cut into little circles instead.
The recipe produced about 6 pretty rounds and 4 janky ones (from where I pushed the extra back together... tasted great, but didn't rise as prettily when they baked...). After chilling for 20 minutes, the cakes are brushed with cream, sprinkled with a little sugar, and tossed in the oven.
After rising and browning, they're good to go.
Check out this lovely interior:
That's some high-quality baking right there. Heh. Anyway, all that remains is to slice up some strawberries, to be tossed with lemon juice and a little sugar, and whip some cream...
With minimal effort (which was a requirement after the kitchen fiascoes that preceded it...), you have yourself the perfect summer dessert...
(I added a little strawberry coulis in that second picture since I didn't let my strawberries macerate for as long as I would have liked...) I almost didn't make this because I was so tired and cranky by the time I was ready to start the prep, but I'm really really glad that I did... and that I have ample leftovers... So very good. Light, delicious, summery... If you've got strawberries sitting around that need an application, I highly recommend this one...

Sunday Cookbook Adventures: More Rick Bayless Mexican Food

An intense craving for Mexican food hit me recently. I realized this most clearly while reading Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," when every time I read about some poor starving person eating beans and tortillas (amidst the blood and gore) I was like "Ooh! Tortillas... Mmmmmm...." Stanley says that makes me a weirdo, but we'll check back with him when he re-reads the book after not having lived near good Mexican food in 4 years... Anyway, when I want to make Mexican food, I tend to turn to Rick Bayless, so I cracked open Mexico One Plate at a Time looking for some new awesome taco recipe and maybe something to do with the beautiful Blood Farm flank steak in my freezer.
For the tacos, I decided on Mexican-style Zucchini Tacos since it seems to finally be summer and zucchini screams "Summer!!!" to me. The only flank steak recipe in the book is Grilled Flank Steak with Tomato-Poblano Salsa, so I decided to go with that... and it turned out to be the first Epic Fail of my cookbook adventure endeavors... Let's start there, shall we? You start off by roasting all of the salsa ingredients (which will also become marinade ingredients). There are poblanos (which I charred on the grill),
tomatoes (charred under the broiler, as instructed, then peeled and cored),
and onions and garlic (oven-roasted without any oil or seasoning, as instructed).
At this point, I was looking forward to the dish. Simple, clean flavors. How can it go wrong... right?
The tomatoes, onions, and garlic are puréed, then added to the diced roasted poblanos. About a half cup of this is added back to the blender to be pureed with balsamic, olive oil, a little sugar, and some salt to become the marinade. The marinade tasted pretty decent, so I added the flank steak...
I hadn't been so sure about the salsa from the get-go, and the more I tasted to try to see what I needed to tweak, the more I realized that nothing could be done to save it. It was absolutely nauseating... as in, I literally thought I was going to throw up if I didn't get that taste out of my mouth. The smell became too much for me, too, and I decided to toss the whole batch. (Such a waste of pretty chiles and tomatoes... Sigh...) I opened the bag where the steak was marinating and (even though I knew the marinade tasted fine) the aroma was reminiscent of the nasty, nasty salsa, so I decided to rinse all of the marinade off and soak the steak in cold water to get any extra ickiness out while I made an emergency grocery run to start over. I have no idea what happened here. I followed the recipe to the letter, and the ingredients were all used elsewhere without problem. I had some garlic issues (I threw away several cloves because they had a "corked wine" aroma when I smashed them), so I wonder if maybe one of the bad garlic cloves snuck in? When I was making pico de gallo later, the warm (it is summer) room-temperature chopped tomatoes had a smell that called back to the salsa to the extent that I started to get a little nauseous again, so it could have just been some crazy reaction to the lightly-roasted tomatoes? I have no clue, but I will not be making this again to find out. If anyone out there tries this recipe (after this ringing endorsement...), let me know if you have better luck. Blech.

On to happier things. Let's talk about Zucchini Tacos. I went off-recipe in two places here. The first was in choosing to grill my corn before cutting off the kernels (because grilled corn is delicious).
I grilled the corn at the same time as I was charring up my poblanos. I guess I technically went off-recipe there, since Bayless says to do it under a broiler. I find that the grill is much more efficient for a large number of chiles (especially when it's already fired up for the corn) and the grill is always a better idea than the broiler on a day where you're running the air conditioner in the kitchen...
The charred skins come off easily, after which stems and seeds are removed.
The next ingredient is zucchini. Zucchini is one of those ingredients that I never give a second thought to most of the year, but find myself seriously craving on hot, sunshiny days...
The zucchini is diced and set aside with sliced roasted poblanos, grilled corn kernels, and cilantro, to be added with some crème fraîche as the dish finishes cooking.
Before we get there, some lovely tomatoes are pulsed in the food processor and set aside.
The second place I officially went of recipe was to substitute pork fat for vegetable oil (because pork fat is more delicious than vegetable oil). I assume "vegetable oil" was just a typo, anyway, where Bayless intended to write "pork fat," so I was more correcting an error in editing than actually changing the recipe... Some onion is sautéed in the pork fat until starting to brown.
Garlic is added and cooked briefly, before the tomatoes are added in and cooked for a few minutes.
This flavor base (as Bayless calls it) can be prepped in advance, with the remaining ingredients added and the cooking completed just before serving. (By the way: This flavor base is the exact same set of ingredients as the part of the salsa that was so disgusting, they're just prepared differently... I have no idea what happened there...) I was working on a back-up plan for the Epic Fail above during this time, so I'll just show you the finished taco filling, which has been sprinkled with a little Mexican queso fresco:
Dished up with homemade corn tortillas, this is totally awesome. I loved the creaminess that the small amount of crème fraîche brought to the sauce, and the zucchini was perfect with the poblanos and corn. I was a happy camper again, almost forgetting about that other dish that I'm not going to talk about any more...
I love having a grocery store 1.5 blocks away so that when a kitchen emergency hits you don't have to go sit in traffic. I always prefer to get produce at Russo's, but my local giant chain store will do in a pinch. I decided to do sort of a carne asada treatment of my flank steak, marinating in lime, garlic and salt,
before grilling to perfection...
I don't think I've ever cooked flank steak before, but this was really good (and way easier than what I was originally attempting). As long as you slice against the grain, it's actually pretty tender, and is definitely a good red meat for tacos.
I also picked up some pico de gallo fixins to have on my steak tacos...
Along with those homemade corn tortillas (which were perhaps what I was craving most of all) and a nice fresh batch of horchata, this is exactly what I was in the mood for.
I will definitely be making the zucchini taco filling again, maybe to serve with grilled shrimp or some other non-steak protein... Overall, I'd actually call the end result of this day of cooking a hard-to-improve-upon success, even if there were some trials and tribulations (and ingredients in the rubbish bin) along the way. This should definitely sate my Mexican food cravings for a while, so I can go back to reading my book without tortilla-longing getting in the way...

Everyday Yumminess: Perfect Caesar Salad

I took a break from the whole "Cookbook Adventures" thing this weekend in an attempt to recover from the weekend before. I wanted simple, delicious comfort food, and realized that I was craving a perfect Caesar Salad and a nice grilled hunk of red meat (in my favorite form: the Rib-Eye). This is very much an Emily-and-Steph Classic. After we discovered that we freaking LOVED anchovies (which happened when we accidentally doubled the anchovies the recipe called for in this dish and were blown away by the deliciousness that ensued), the next logical thing to do was to start perfecting a classic Caesar salad dressing. It's so simple and, despite the seemingly-permanent (at the time) garlic breath it brings with it, it is still my favorite Caesar dressing I've ever had. The ingredients are pretty standard: Egg. Anchovies. Garlic. Parmesan. Olive oil.
The quality of anchovy makes a big difference here. My favorite are salt-packed Spanish anchovies that don't have any English words on the package, but these (from Russo's) were pretty great and easier to use since you didn't have to pull out bones and whatnot. You need 8 anchovy fillets for this recipe, along with 2-3 garlic cloves, an egg, 2 ounces of grated Parmesan cheese, and olive oil "to taste."
A couple caveats: You must use fresh garlic here. I sort of assume that if you're into food then you would almost never use jarred pre-minced garlic... but this dressing has no chance of being awesome unless you use fresh, so I thought I'd better specify. With the Parmesan, I have to mention that it's given as a mass instead of a volume because 2 ounces of Parmesan can be anywhere ranging from less than 1/4 cup to more than a cup, depending on how you grate it. Anyway... Throw everything but the oil in a blender to purée, drizzle in olive oil until you get the consistency and flavor that you want, season with fresh ground black pepper (and more garlic or anchovies if needed) and you're done. Sometimes we've been known to brighten it with a squeeze of lemon juice if it wasn't quite perfect at that point. For the croutons, I used Brioche this time (because why use anything else?).
My new-found love of Brioche has definitely helped me recover from the hostility I feel over not being able to find good sourdough bread in New England... (When I go back west, I'll probably get all hostile now if I can't readily find good Brioche... Heh.) Anyway, I decided to switch things up a bit from the way Steph and I used to do the croutons. I started by making some garlic oil by slowly steeping sliced garlic in a bit of olive oil over very low heat. I basically just put some oil in a pan with sliced garlic, turned the heat to it's lowest setting, and wandered away to do other things for about a half hour (maybe longer? I wasn't really paying attention...). When I came back, I had garlic oil.
The cubes of Brioche are tossed with this and seasoned with sea salt,
then sent into a 325°F oven until toasty and beautiful.
My house smelled insane as these finished cooking. This will definitely be my go-to method for garlic croutons from now on. I sliced a big, beautiful Blood Farm Rib-Eye in half so as not to have a pound of meat for dinner...The steak is (heavily, because it's just for me) seasoned with sea salt and black pepper, then thrown on the grill until perfectly rare, and plated up as my perfect Steak & Caesar dinner...
(Remember when I said that I may never grill a steak again? I totally lied... That is the power of Thomas Keller when he has you in his thrall... As perfect as Keller's pan-seared method is, I love the char of the grill and the complete lack of clean-up or oven-heating involved...) This meal was exactly what I needed, especially the part where it took no time at all to make. Further proof that weekend dinners don't always have to be a big production... We'll see how many times I have to teach myself that lesson before it starts sinking in...

Because I'm in the mood for a ramble, this is maybe an ideal meal to segue into something that I've been mulling over since last week's Kerala-inspired feast: I realize that I don't really enjoy cooking for people. I guess I should caveat that by noting that "people" means "people I'm not ridiculously comfortable with." I love to cook. I also love the food that I cook. The thing is, I have a very specific palate. While chefs like Thomas Keller have demonstrated to me the beauty of subtlety, I know when I make a dish that I refer to as "Emily-style," I'm usually referring to the fact that the flavors are intended to be a punch in the face. To me, the dressing in this post is the world's most awesome Caesar dressing, but that's the case because the garlic and anchovy are so intense that they almost burn your tongue. I wouldn't serve this salad to "people." I would serve it to my family (with a warning that they may hate it). I would serve it to Steph or to Mel (with no such warning, because they're Steph and Mel). That's pretty much it.

I feel like it's a strange thing for me to love cooking as much as I do, to love sharing food with friends as much as I do, but to have such... I guess "dread" is the word... about cooking for "people." I think my main issue is an (irrational?) fear of judgment. I know that whenever I cook for/with Steph (for example), even if the dish totally fails it will be something we ponder together and figure out how to tweak for the next time. I don't ever worry about the people who aren't included in "people" judging me based on my food. I hate when I'm cooking for somebody and they say "I heard you're a great cook!" because, honestly, I don't know that that's true. What I am is somebody who loves to cook, and somebody who loves the food that she cooks... When I cook for myself, I have so much fun playing with flavors and building the perfect Emily-style dish. When I cook for "people," I stress myself out trying to make something that they will like, and I lose a lot of the joy.

Maybe I need culinary therapy or something... but does anybody else feel this way? Or is it just a formerly-super-shy, OCD, crazy-lady thing?

Sunday Cookbook Adventures: Kerala-Inspired Indian Feast

Where do I even begin with this meal? This was the most time I've spent in the kitchen in a very long time. It was a lot of fun, but also probably a bit insane... The forces responsible for this meal are two of my favorite cookbook authors, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, and their fantastic book, Mangoes and Curry Leaves.

After the amazingness of my Kerala-style Curried Calamari, I had Kerala on the brain... so I turned to the index of Mangoes and Curry Leaves and started looking up dishes from the region. The Tilapia Green Curry appealed to me immediately, and I decided to pair it with a flatbread. Dosas sounded like a good choice, but apparently it's totally inappropriate to make dosas without a chutney and a sambhar... so I added Shallot Sambhar and Coconut Chutney to the menu... The Coconut Chutney also pairs well with the Chickpea Fritters, apparently, so those went on the list... Then, for reasons that are no longer clear to me, I added a Kerala-style Spiced Grated Carrots dish to the menu. Oh, and I decided to make a batch of plain homemade yogurt to use in the carrot dish. So, um... Yeah. This is one of those times when my compulsive nature gets the better of me. It's totally impractical to flip back and forth in a (beautiful) cookbook with this many dishes, so I typically copy the pages I need and hang them up in my work space:
Let's get to the food, shall we? (The epic length of this post is probably appropriate for the 12+ hours in the kitchen that the preparation of this menu entailed...)

Dosas
The dosas were surprisingly easy to make, despite the fact that the recipe description says that "it's not the simplest bread in the world to make"... It starts by soaking Urad Dal overnight.
The dal is then blended until smooth,
and combined with rice flour, water, and a thickened rice-flour-and-water paste, then allowed to ferment for many hours.
At dinner time, the dosas are cooked in a skillet and you're good to go. I took the authors' advice and had some Coconut Chutney handy to sample the dosas and make sure they were of sufficient quality. They were. (And they took the chutney to a new level, as well.)
I tried my first bite of coconut chutney and dosa at around 9pm, on a day where cooking had begun just after 7am... It was pretty much my first real taste of how this meal was going to turn out, and it was a relief after so many hours to know that it would all be worth it...

Shallot Sambhar
The Sambhar was probably my least favorite dish of the evening, but every other dish left me pondering how it was possible that something could taste SO. Freaking. Good... so that's not really an insult. The first step is to mix up a batch of sambhar powder. This starts with dried chilies, coriander seed, cumin seed, cinnamon stick, black peppercorns, and Toovar Dal.
The spices are toasted in a dry cast iron skillet (separately, since they require different cooking times)...
A spice grinder is used to grind the spices in batches, and you have a handy batch of sambhar powder for all of your cooking needs...
The next ingredient is tamarind pulp, softened in hot water and then pushed through a fine sieve.
The last few ingredients (in addition to a big pot of simmered Toovar Dal), are tomatoes, shallots, chilies, and curry leaves.
These are added sequentially to a hot pan (along with the tamarind liquid and sambhar powder)...
... then added to the simmered dal.
This was an attractive dish and was pretty good with the dosas, but, as I mentioned above, it just didn't blow my mind the way some of its company on the table did... Still glad to have made a sambhar, though, since I may never have lived down the shame of serving dosas without one...

Chickpea Fritters
Speaking of things that blew my mind... wow. I tasted these and had to go look at the recipe again because it makes no sense at all that they taste so good. You start with chickpeas (ideally from Rancho Gordo):
which are soaked in water for several hours or overnight.
The only other ingredients are shallot, ginger, chilies, and cilantro.
This all goes into a food processor and comes out a course mixture...
which you then shape into patties...
before deep-frying to golden perfection.
Honestly, these are one of my very favorite things from this feast. (There's a bit of a log-jam at the top of that list...) Combined with the Coconut chutney, these became almost transcendent. So simple. So very delicious. Awesome.

Coconut Chutney
Speaking of that chutney, this was one of my two coconut-wrestling matches of the weekend. The other (which you'll see in the Tilapia section) featured young coconuts, but the chutney required grown-up coconuts...
With my hacking cleaver, I was able to slice off the tops,
and a hammer helped me to break the rest into workable pieces... A little elbow grease and a vegetable peeler, and I had a big bowl of coconut meat.
Mmmm... As a kid, coconut was the one food that I thought I hated (before I realized that caraway seeds are made out of evil, that is). It wasn't until college and my first experience with Thai curries that I realized I only hate sweetened coconut, and that natural coconut is absolutely fantastic. I grated the coconut with the julienne blade on my food processor, and was ready to go.
The coconut goes into a blender with tamarind (prepared as above, only with less water), ginger, and chilies, while a "tempering" liquid is prepared from black mustard seeds, ground Toovar Dal, and curry leaves cooked in a little coconut oil
I feel like this should have been a food processor item rather than a blender item, and I ended up having to add some of the coconut water from the young coconuts (which was far superior to that from the grown-up coconuts) to get things to a blend-able consistency.
This was pretty tasty out of the bowl, but absolutely shined when it met a hot-from-the-pan dosa or a hot-from-the-fryer Chickpea Fritter. Well worth the scraped-up knuckles from my fight with the coconuts...

Kerala-Style Spiced Grated Carrots
This is a dish that I pondered dropping from the menu as exhaustion set in, but I'm extremely glad that I didn't, since it is one of those dishes clustered at the top of the ol' "Emmo's Favorite Foods from Sunday" list... and is another that left me baffled at how so few simple ingredients could taste so effing good.
Those ingredients are shallots, curry leaves, chilies, ginger, turmeric powder, and black mustard seeds, all of which go along with grated carrots and a little yogurt. (Are you starting to notice some redundancy in ingredient lists? It would appear that curry leaves, black mustard seeds, and chilies are sort of key to this cuisine...)
After black mustard seeds are popped in a little oil, the shallots and turmeric are added...
Then the rest...
The final ingredient is a little (homemade, in this case) plain yogurt, stirred through off the heat at the end of cooking.
This was absolutely fantastic. I had no expectations whatsoever for this dish. I had actually pondered making a half-batch, but ended up wishing I'd made a double batch. Fantastic. But on to the star of the show...

Tilapia Green Curry
This is another incredibly simple, incredibly delicious dish. Things start off with a Masala Paste, which starts off with fresh coconut. I had accidentally brought home young coconut (as mentioned above), but it was far too delicious not to use, and I thought it would be perfect in this dish...
Turns out young coconuts are WAY easier to wrangle than grown-up coconuts...
The rest of the Masala paste is ginger, garlic, shallots, chilies, cilantro, ground coriander, and ground turmeric...
which are puréed into a fantastically vibrant-looking paste...
The recipe also calls for tomatoes (or fish tamarind, which I could not track down), more chilies, curry leaves, coconut oil, and black mustard seeds,
as well as a "tempering" liquid of ghee, chilies, shallots, garlic, and curry leaves.Mustard seeds are popped in oil... curry leaves and Masala Paste deliciousness are added...
The tomatoes go in with a little water and things are brought to a simmer...
... then the tilapia is added and simmered until just cooked through.
The hot tempering liquid is added just before serving, and you have yourself an awesome curry. Trust me when I tell you that what it it lacks aesthetically it more than makes up for in flavor...
The young coconut is so bright and fresh, along with the ginger and cilantro. Another dish of very simple ingredients that comes together tasting way better than it has any business tasting.

So, there you have it. I will definitely be making several of these dishes again on their own, but it may be a good long while before I spend this kind of time in the kitchen for no apparent reason...
I really love this style of food, and I thought it was cool to see how the same basic ingredients could come together into such a varied array of deliciousness. I (obviously) ended up with leftovers, and every time I take a bite of a Chickpea Fritter, the Coconut Chutney, or those danged Carrots, I find myself baffled by how great they taste. The curry I knew I would love, but these sides were a revelation. It's always good when something educational can be simultaneously delicious... Yay, Kerala!