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!"

Valentine's Feast (Alternate Title: My Mom is Awesome)

UPDATE: I've now uploaded the recipes here if anyone wants to recreate portions of this meal... The soup with lemon dumplings is here.

As I was enjoying an amazing 5-course dinner with my parents last night, I realized something: Nobody has ever cooked a dinner party for me.  I love to cook (obviously), and I love throwing dinner parties, but it was one of the nicest gifts my mom could have given me when she prepared everything for this feast and then brought the whole production over to my house so that she and my dad could share it with me.  There's sometimes a misconception about us people who are obsessed with food and cooking... an idea that, because we love to go crazy in the kitchen, we're going to be harsh critics of other people's cooking and thus are too intimidating to cook for... (When, in fact, I love very simple food, too... and even a grilled cheese sandwich is enough to rock my world if I didn't have to make it myself...) Even though this wasn't a cool restaurant or my own cooking, I wanted to share the meal my mom prepared for us...

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...

Cookbook Adventures: Another Take on 48-Hour Short Ribs

I had such a delicious experience with her awesome zucchini dumplings, I went right back to Susan Feniger's Street Food to try another dish. 

The inspiration for trying (and modifying) Korean-Glazed Short Ribs with Sesame and Asian Pear was the abundance of Asian pears hanging from the tree in my back yard. 

Maybe it was because the marinade reminded me of the marinade for Momofuku's 48-hour short ribs, maybe it was just because after cooking short ribs sous vide I would never cook them any other way, but I ended up straying pretty far from the recipe when it came to the cooking of the ribs...  Whatever the reason, the results were totally awesome...

Sous Vide Apple Craziness

A friend brought me a big bag of random apples (no idea what kind, just harvested from some trees he was working near), and I was trying to think of something more interesting than an apple crisp to make with them.  What I ended up making turned out pretty freaking cool...

Perfect Sous Vide Tuna

I'm always futzing with my tuna-cooking technique in our family-favorite recipe of Seared Tuna with Ginger-Shiitake Cream Sauce.  The recipe for the sauce is pretty much perfect as written (except I make a double-batch of sauce for 6 servings... because it's that good and I always want guests to get as much as they want...), but the prescribed method of cooking the tuna is kind of stupid.  After playing around with a few methods, I have finally found The One, giving me just a couple millimeters of sear on the outside with an interior that is warm and bright pink all the way through.

The key to this technique was to partially freeze the tuna steaks (for about 30-60 minutes... we just threw them in the freezer while we enjoyed a pre-dinner cocktail on the patio) before searing in a very hot pan.  (This prevents the interior from overcooking while you get a good sear.)  From here you chill again for a few minutes before vacuum sealing and throwing into a 110°F water bath for 30 minutes.  This is the only way I'll be doing my tuna steaks from now on...  Perfection!

Cookbook Adventures: Amazing Zucchini Dumplings

While pondering what to do with some extra zucchini from my mom's garden, I stumbled across a Cook the Book post over at Eatocracy with pictures of some insanely delicious-looking dumplings.  I knew the moment I saw that picture that I was going to have to make them myself as soon as possible..

 

My brother was laughing at me because I was explaining that I almost never cook vegetarian...  I told him I was planning to make these dumplings, and I said, "Ooh.  Those are vegetarian!  I'm serving them with pork..."  Subtract the pork from the equation, though, and they'd be a really impressive vegetarian appetizer...

Chicken Makhani and Other Yumminess

Prompted by another pound of beautiful green beans in my last produce delivery and by a desire to try some new recipes, those beans led to my cooking an Indian(-inspired) feast...

Chicken Makhani, Saag, Dal, and Green Beans with Coconut Spice...  (Plus homemade Naan, of course...)

From the Garden: Fava Bean Agnolotti with Curry Emulsion

While I was still crashing with my parents, I had the brilliant idea that "we" should grow our own fava beans in their amazing garden. 

I say "we" in the sense that I came up with the idea, ordered the seeds, then sat in a reclining patio chair with a glass of wine while I watched my mom plant them... I left the rest of the work to my mom, but she was kind enough to bring me the bulk of the harvest anyway...

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.

Cookbook Adventures: Momofuku Ramen

A little over a year and a half after buying the book, I finally got around to making the dish I knew I had to make: Last night, I finally made Momofuku Ramen for dinner (fresh alkaline noodles and all).

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.

Happy Birthday to Me!

I turned 32 a few weeks ago, and had a dinner party with friends this past weekend to celebrate. Thanks to the total awesomeness of my friends, it was an incredibly fun evening. The food didn't turn out too shabby either. A few highlights below...

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.