Author: foodnerd

My body and mind are so much happier with me now that I have a proper kitchen and have taken a couple of fruitful trips to the Whole Paycheck and the local mexican and asian markets. I scored some ramps, since I had never had them and my friend H has been obsessing about them lately, AND they were looking pretty nice in the market, and $2.50 is cheap for a thrill.
I turned them into two salads, three really if you count the green salad I made for dinner one night with garrotxa cheese, ramps, green leaf lettuce, grape tomatoes, & carrots. The ramps & garrotxa complemented each other well and their nuttiness went well with the sweet tomatoes and carrots. Anyway, the ones in the picture are a barley salad with grated carrots, sliced celery, grape tomatoes and ramp greens in a simple vinaigrette, and a french green lentil salad with currants, ramp whites and peppadew peppers in similar vinaigrette. Lord, I love those damn peppadews! This lentil salad is my favorite — all nutty sweet vinegary goodness. The combination really works, and it’s so simple. If you haven’t got any ramps, you could swap in shallots to good effect, I would think.
I served these (to myself) with a skirt steak panfried rare with a cilantro chimichurri. Ahhh, vegetables, fiber, meat, fresh flavors! Whew.

In the course of our discussion of the nasty cream of chicken rice soup I had the other day, cindy & i decided this dish was worthy of a blogverse challenge: We want to see your non-gloppy, non-gluey, non-bland cream of chicken & rice soup. There is no reason this worthy old-fashioned dish should be consigned to the lowest circles of food-service purgatory. It should be rich, creamy, full of chicken flavor, warming & comforting. Preference will be given to the traditional flavor profile, but variants such as avgolemono are still more than welcome. Whip up your asskicker of a soup, post it and let us know about it, let’s say by the end of May, since by then it should be too warm most everywhere to really need any more thick warm savory soups. Do we need to offer a prize, or is pride of craftsmanship and triumph over processed ickiness prize enough? 🙂
(Update: I am buying a remaindered-but-new copy of the Second Union Square Cookbook to offer as the prize. This is the book that had the unbelievable salad in it that my friend made for his dinner party, so I think it should be worthy for the creamy-chicken-soup champeen. I also have added a mail link to my sidebar, so you can more easily alert me to your soupy posts: foodnerd at-this-domain. Hurray! Can’t wait to see what you all get up to.)

Last night I was finally able to thank J & M in person for letting me stay in their empty apartment for 3 weeks (egad!). It was such an unbelievable godsend — I had no idea it would take so long to nail down a roommate situation, and I would never have been able to impose on H & J for such a long time without expiring from the guilt. How to thank people for such a favor, you ask? Well, duh: cook for them!
That covers the gratitude; we also had much to celebrate, since H just received confirmation that she’s got the job she wants and has worked so hard for these last months, I’ve finally gotten an apartment lined up so that I can leave the lovely-but-distant apartment of J & M for a place of my own, and on top of that, it’s finally May, finally spring, finally warm.
Having had the presence of mind to bring my kebab kubideh recipe with me, a wonderful spring recipe if ever there was one, I settled on that as the main dish, thinking to complement it with some sort of salad, and do fallen chocolate souffle cake for dessert, since it is idiot-proof and i am an idiot when it comes to baking. But as H & I went along in the kitchen, we got a little excited and ended up with two additional courses. I love cooking with friends — it is such a joy. Here is what we ended up with:
amuse-bouche of blanched favas roughly mashed with goat’s milk feta, with a bit of salad, oil-cured black olives, and peppadew peppers (thanks to the delightful cook sister! for the tip on these little red balls of sweet-spicy deliciousness), drizzled with a bit of olive oil, lemon & salt. This dish was H’s brainwave, and a mighty success in my opinion.
cool soup of carrots and a bit of potato steamed in the onion juice leftover from the kebabs, pureed with hot hungarian paprika, lemon, sherry vinegar, yogurt, cream, salt & pepper. And dill, let us not forget the fresh dill. Best to let this sit a little while (at least 30 min) to let it cool down and blend flavors, but easy as can be.
buttered basmati rice, the always-lovely kebabs kubideh with their saffron butter coating, grilled tomatoes, and sumac to sprinkle over. Also a yogurt salad/sauce of greek yogurt, salted diced cucumber, dried mint & ground black pepper.
true salad course of green leaf lettuce, arugula, thin sliced radishes, thin sliced fennel, dill & cilantro, and a mustard-lemon not-vinaigrette with a bit of the peppadew juice in it. There is a word for a salad dressing made with lemon in place of the vinegar, but it is escaping me at the moment.
and of course, the chocolate cake, but we could not just stop there, so we cut up some fresh strawberries and mixed them with port and sugar to serve alongside with the sweetened vanilla whipped cream. (I have yet to discover a situation in which berries and various fruits are not made insanely more delicious by the addition of a sweet dessert wine. Yow!)
We also had some port and some of J’s pisco with grapes with our dessert, so we were well and truly sedated by the time we were done. I adore evenings like this, with friends old and new, with delicious ingredients, and with a menu that allows relaxed confidence enough to take a bit more time to provide the little flourishes that make a meal special, but also allows ample space for creative improvisation at the spur of the moment. I am very happy this morning.

In my limited kitchen, I have been making things with the tortillas and eggs and chorizo that I have, and I have settled on a pretty good method, based loosely on the chilaquiles rojos recipe on the back of the tortilla package. It is particularly useful for improving crappy supermarket tortillas.
Take a good chunk of spicy chorizo and start it frying, smushing it with the back of your spoon. When you have a little rendered fat, add some diced red bell pepper. When it’s all nice and fried (pepper soft, chorizo browning), add cut-up tortillas and stir. When the tortillas are soft and well blended into the mess, break an egg in there and stir it in to scramble & cook. Top with some cheese. Chow breakfast. Or dinner. Whatever.
You could put in onion & garlic, or avocado, or rice, or tomato, to change it up. I’ve been eating some form of this all week, and it’s saved my hungry butt more than once when I’ve dragged in after the 80 minute commute home. I wish I could more easily find Mexican chorizo in Boston — I must not be looking in the right place. It’s a tasty treat.

One day late because i am still homeless and don’t have kitchen and internet within 5 miles of each other (so not kidding), but I really wanted to be sure to participate in IMBB Orange, because a) it is cool and b) orange is one of the best colors EVER. This is the most orange thing that I make, and given my current circumstances thank goodness it’s also blindingly easy to make. Especially since I scored a box grater at the very last minute for 25 cents at a yardsale yesterday (whew). It is so refreshing and delicious, and goes with lots of different foods as a side salad.
Peel carrots — I used 3 big ones — and grate. Chop a bit of cilantro & add that, squeeze in a lime, sprinkle with salt & pepper, and drizzle with just a bit of mild oil. Toss. You can eat it immediately or let it marinate a little while, either way it will taste sweet from the carrots, sour from the lime and savory from the salt & pepper. Crunchy too, always a plus in my book, and just think of all the vitamin C & betacarotene in this thing.