Freezer Adventures: Roasted Duck Red Curry

Confession: It's possible that I'm a bit of a food-hoarder.  I could tell you a sad story about the time in my life that I blame for this tendency, but it's really not that interesting or important.  The important thing is that I am the kind of person who winds up with a duck, 3 Magret duck breasts, and 4 duck leg quarters in my freezer for longer than is remotely necessary.  Half of that duck is going to turn into something Trinidadian soon. (Actually soon.  I promise.) The rest turned into one of my favorite foods: Roast Duck Red Curry...

How (Not) To Cook For One - Prosciutto, Cremini, and Pea Tortellini

I've been making an effort lately to make small batches of amazing food when I have a craving...  Not filling up the freezer and/or forcing myself to eat the same meal (no matter how delicious) 8 times in a row... I think of it as "cooking for one," but I'm really bad at it...  Here's how it happens.

Extra-Meaty Ragú Napoletano

Every now and then, we get a craving for some old-school, rustic, meaty tomato sauce with pasta.  I've tried my hand at a couple different versions of bolognese, but there was always something missing. This meat sauce, on the other hand, is basically perfection, and I'm psyched to have 3 quarts more of it waiting for me in the freezer to satisfy our next craving...

Everyday Yumminess: "Holy Crap" Shrimp & Grits

Mothers' Day was this past weekend, and we thought making my mom brunch at home made a lot more sense than waiting in super-long lines at any of our favorite brunch spots in town.  Shrimp & Grits came to mind right away, which led us on a recipe search when we realized we had no idea how we'd made this dish last time.  I found a recipe at allrecipes.com (of all places) that (with a couple minor changes) turned out to be pretty darned spectacular, and when all was said and done we found ourselves sitting down to one of the most awesomely delicious meals we've cooked in recent memory, leading me to exclaim several times during brunch "Holy crap!  This is AMAZING!"

Everyday Yumminess: Carnitas Hash with Eggs

This is one of those meals where I started with a recipe... but then failed to follow any part of that recipe and still ended up with something super-yummy.  In the end, I suppose the recipe just stuck an idea in my head: "Carnitas Hash is probably delicious."  A few weeks later, when I had some carnitas vacuum-sealed in the freezer and found myself with extra Yukon Gold potatoes, it seemed like the best possible way to remedy those two situations...

Everyday Yumminess: Chicken Divan Casserole

My mom tells me that she sometimes made Chicken Divan Casserole for us when we were growing up. I am not about to call my mother a liar, but somehow the food memory didn't dig itself very far into my brain, so this isn't a dish I would have thought to seek out a recipe for and make... A couple weeks ago, though, a friend mentioned some pangs of nostalgia for the Chicken Divan his mom had made for him when he was young...and what kind of friend would I be if I didn't try to make a version of this classic for him? (I know the pictures of the finished dish are a little scrappy, but it's comfort food so I wasn't about to mess around with fancy plating...)

Sous Vide Makes it Better: Two Curries

I haven't made a lot of "new" dishes lately, but something I do a lot of is re-making things I've made before, only switching the cooking method over to sous vide.  I tried this with two curries last week, and was incredibly happy (for different reasons) with both dishes...  The first dish was Beef Rendang with Roti Canai.

Everyday Yumminess: My Favorite Buttery Flatbread

As I mentioned when I made the Mission Street Food Buttery Flatbread, one of the reasons I was a little disappointed by that flatbread was my preexisting love of an easier version...  I first made these Roti Canai almost 5 years ago when I was still living in Australia.  (I have no idea where the original recipe came from anymore...) They're kind of fun to make, super-delicious, and super-buttery...  

Pizza Fest: Playing with My New Baking Steel

After all the buzz on the interwebs, I couldn't resist spending some Christmas-present money on a new toy: the baking steel... It turns out all the hype is correct.  

(As you can see, I got the 1/2-inch version.) I tried three different crusts on my new steel, and every one of them blew me away with how amazing it turned out... 

Yum...

Everyday Yumminess: Sriracha Salt

I bought my food dehydrator back in the day because I wanted to use it as a yogurt-making incubator.  While that remains its primary purpose in my kitchen, I like finding other random uses for it (e.g., prosciutto-powder).  The most recent application was to streamline a recipe for Sriracha Salt.

Everyday Yumminess: Homemade Tonic Water

This is something I'd been wanting to try for a while so, once I got a soda siphon for Christmas, it shot to the top of my queue.  Homemade tonic water (or, more accurately, tonic concentrate that is mixed with soda water to make tonic water) isn't necessarily going to save you any money over generic-brand store-bought versions.  This is a case where the DIY version is superior because it lets you tweak the flavors to your palate.  (I, for example, hate how sweet store-bought tonic water often is... so when I made my own I cut back on the agave the recipe called for and it was perfect...)

Everyday Yumminess: Perfect Ricotta Revisited

In all the chaos of preparing to move and then moving, it had been quite a while since I'd made a batch of ricotta. In the meantime, a comment appeared on my last post about ricotta from a brilliant woman named Lynn suggesting an improved technique that has all the convenience of the sous vide method but doesn't involve any consumables (bags, cheesecloth, etc...).
I tried this technique for yogurt-making a couple weeks ago and it was fantastic, then today I finally got around to making a batch of ricotta with this new method and it's super-cool. Thus, I thought I'd better share the new method as its own post so that even people who don't read the comments on the older post can learn about it.

Everyday Yumminess: Ad Hoc Fried Chicken Revisted

When I first made Thomas Keller's fried chicken recipe from the Ad Hoc at Home cookbook, it was pretty much the most amazing fried chicken I had ever tasted in my entire life. The recipe is pretty simple, especially by Thomas Keller standards, but I get super-stressed-out frying chicken on the bone, worrying about whether or not I will get it cooked perfectly all the way through to the bone without over-cooking it. The solution to this "problem" is the same solution I come up with for most kitchen problems: sous vide!

Everyday Yumminess: Totally Awesome French Fries (and a Tasty Burger)

I've always felt that perfect french fries are an important dish to have in one's making-your-friends-think-you're-a-good-cook repertoire. Historically, I used the method that "everyone" uses: soak in water, fry at low temperature to cook the interior, fry at high temperature to get the exterior crispy, then be sad 2 minutes later when your once-crispy fries have lost all crispiness. (Maybe that last part only happens to me? I don't know...) Poking around the interweb, I can across a lot of blogs (e.g., this one, which has step-by-step pictures) talking about cold oil french fries, a recipe that appears to have originated at Cook's Illustrated (and was inspired there by Jöel Robuchon). In short, they are super-easy to make, incredibly crunchy long after they finish cooking, and even have 1/3 less fat than fries cooked the usual way. Awesome.

Sous Vide Pork Roast with Savory Fennel Bread Pudding

Just when I came up with a new game plan to be able to cook a bit more, my life is going through some more upheaval. I'll write about that more as it happens, but for now one implication is that I need to start using up my stockpile of proteins in the chest freezer. To help me with this, I invited a couple friends over for a simple dinner the other night.

A Low-Maintenance Thanksgiving

Oh. Hello, there. Long time, no write. Things haven’t been so great around here, pain-wise, so it’s been hard to spend much time in the kitchen (or doing much of anything worth writing about, really). I have an idea of how I may be able to start posting here again, which I’ll write about this week, but first I managed to put together a Thanksgiving feast for myself with minimal time in the kitchen.

Perfect-er Perfect Ricotta

I've continued to make fresh ricotta pretty frequently using the sous vide method from Ideas in Food that I outlined in a previous post. This became even easier when I got my chamber vacuum, making it possible to vacuum-seal the bag of ingredients without messing around with having to seal a zip-top bag inside a vacuum bag. The one thing that was still bugging me was having to go through cheesecloth during production. Over the course of the past few months, I've come up with a (quite ghetto-looking) solution to this problem, so I figured I would share it here. The new method has taken my perfect ricotta and made it even perfecter...

Still My Favorite Way to Cook Corn...

Corn was on sale $1.50 per 6-pack last time I ordered groceries, so I had no choice but to order lots of corn. I was originally thinking of doing a "creamed" corn with basil (which I mentioned, among other things, in this post), but then the first issue of Lucky Peach arrived at my door, and as David Chang wrote about ramen I remembered how awesome it was making his ramen broth, and then I remembered how I had ramen broth in the freezer... and remembered the dish for which I had made it... and I instantly knew (well, instantly once all that remembering was done) what I had to make with my giant pile of corn: Roasted Sweet Summer Corn with Miso Butter, Bacon, and Roasted Onions.

Blueberry Goodness

I've been on a blueberry kick lately, pretty much ever since they were on sale at a too-good-to-pass-up price and I was reminded how awesome they are. While I enjoy just eating them on their own, my favorite thing to do with them is to make Blueberry Clafouti. The first recipe I tried was the one here, and it never gave me any reason to move on to experimenting with any other... I like to rewarm them to have with my morning coffee, or to serve with a soup of vanilla frozen yogurt as dessert. Simple, quick, and totally delicious.

Playing with a New Toy: Applewood-Smoked Scallops with Spring "Succotash" and Bacon Beurre Blanc

After months on my mental wish list, a cool new toy arrived at my door for my birthday: The Smoking Gun. I knew I wanted to play with smoking a scallop first... and thought about pairing bacon with the smokiness... and also using gorgeous spring favas and asparagus... This is what I came up with:
The Bacon Beurre Blanc broke under the heat of the smoke (I'll be tweaking that component today... update to follow), but the flavors of this dish were amazing. It was almost as though I am a genius...