Category: In the Kitchen

Late last night, I realized I’d left a pot of sauteed kale on the stove waiting to cool. So I got out of bed, went downstairs, and surprised a little mouse who scampered over the stove and disappeared.
That little fucker turned out to be hiding in the corner of the counter — I could see his silhouette, and when I poked at him to confirm I wasn’t imagining it, he ducked behind my jar of spoons. I could see his verminous little tail sticking out.
By this time the enraged yelling had roused tallasiandude as well, and he came down to see what was going on. I wasn’t letting that little critter out of my sight, but I was too tired to also think up a way to catch him and get rid of him. But tallasiandude had the presence of mind to grab a little trap, box him in, and catch him… and then throw the rotten little marauder outside.
There were tiny little mousepoops on my stove. EEEEEEEWWWW. And I decided I couldn’t be sure the pot of kale was unscathed, so that had to go too. Hateful little bastards, mice. Yuck.

garden peas with shiitake and sweet onion
Shelled a bunch of peas from the parental garden, and sauteed in a tsp of butter with some soaked dried shiitake and diced vidalia (also from the parental garden). Deeply satisfying, particularly mixed with the brown rice shown in the photo.

quasi-russian-salad plus toasted sauerkraut rye and canned salmon salad
Still trying to use up all the pickled things, so I chopped them up (pickled onion and green bean and cuke), blanched turnip and carrot, and diced the fantastic pickled beets that K made for us, to come up with a salad vaguely reminiscent of the classic russian chopped salad, except with no mayo or canned peas. It turned out delicious, and fairly begged for rye toast and salmon salad. The toast is the sauerkraut rye from the local Panorama bakery, which i have been trying to get hold of for months (wouldn’t you? seriously, bread with sauerkraut in it? yes, please!). It’s not as sauerkrauty as I’d imagined, but very good, moist and with a solid rye/caraway flavor.

shrimp salad in half an avocado
It was so hot and humid for so long that we pretty much didn’t turn on a stove for days on end, and ate whatever cold dishes I could come up with. This was one of the best, inspired by perfectly ripe avocados at Whole Foods and a memory of the incredibly good shrimp salad we had at Duarte’s Tavern in Pescadero, CA. That salad was tiny pink shrimp mixed with diced vegetables and mayo, and mounded into an avocado half, and surrounded by salad composed of incongruous stuff like beets, which should not have worked but totally did. So i found a can of tiny shrimps, blanched some turnip and carrot, diced some cucumber, and chopped some dill and celery leaves — mixed it all together and put it on half an avocado, on top of farmer’s market oak leaf lettuce with some more of K’s pickled beets. We were rather pleased with it.

I keep reading about different kinds of burgers on Just Bento, and turkey burgers came up at some point, so i had it on the brain already… and I’ve had a bag of 6 burger buns taking up ungodly amounts of space in my fridge for over 2 weeks now. Turkey’s low in fat, so what the hell, we’ll try it.
A quick google turned up this pair of articles about turkey burgers on Off The Broiler, a blog new to me but pleasantly nerdy and practical. I stole much of his method, and mixed up a batch of 6 burgers using:
1 lb dark ground turkey
.5 lb white ground turkey
big fat squirt yellow mustard
2 shallots, minced
1 tsp korean miso (with bean chunks, but that seemed to work out ok)
big fat squirt Louisiana hot sauce
I cooked them in a cast iron skillet over medium heat, and they gave off lots of juice, which caramelized into a lovely looking stuff that I couldn’t bear to waste, and i found that smearing them around over that browned sauce gave them a very nice color and flavor by sopping up all that proto-fond. One note: flat burgers cook fine, no need to put a little center-dent as you do with beef burgers — that’ll just get you a donut-shaped turkey burger. Heh heh heh.
These tasted pretty good, but still were bland enough to be overpowered by the strong homemade relish I put on. But they were tender and juicy, no dried out low-fat pucks, and quite savory and satisfying. I think the method works, the miso is a tenderizing juice-preserver, and the way is open to flavor experimentation every which way. Yum.

I bought some Ezekiel 4:9 sprouted wheat penne, whilst in the throes of having read an article about the increased nutrition in sprouted grains. I’m also trying to figure out what changes I can make to my foodwhore diet to drop some of the extra 20 pounds I’m lugging around. I figured I’d at least try it.
It’s nasty.
It tastes like pasta made of beans, which isn’t surprising since there are two types of beans in it. If you overcook it even a little bit, it gets mushy and falls apart, and the difference between hard in the middle and mushy is about 30 seconds in the pot. It’s pasty and grainy.
I first served it with sauteed kale and garlic and broad beans, which wasn’t atrocious, since the kale and beans were in the same nutty flavor universe as the pasta, but when we tried it with some tomato sauce it was just yucky.
Armed with this knowledge and the hope that a nutty tasting pasta might taste better with actual nuts, today I cooked the rest and put it together with some well-salted zucchini and vidalia onion, chopped walnuts, a sprinkle of salt & pepper and some walnut oil. This was actually something I might consider food. It was reasonably tasty, with the salt and bright squash and nutty oil working their magic, and though the pasta has a tendency to stick to your teeth, it was at least cooked the right amount this time. I won’t, however, be buying this product again — life is just too short.

I LOVE chicken salad. And I almost never get it, because I don’t trust restaurants not to put 8 pounds of mayo and huge chunks of celery in it.
But whenever I get some extra cooked chicken — specifically when i have some extra pulled off the bones from making soup — I like to make some chicken salad. The most recent version had nothing but mayo, celery leaves (LEAVES, you will note, not gross crunchy blocks), dill and salt & pepper.
And as always, I am struck by how mindbendingly delicious just-plain-chicken can be when in close quarters with mayonnaise. I eat it extra slowly so as not to miss any of it, because it never lasts long. Yums.

I have jars of pickled everything still left from last year — I might have gotten a little carried away. So I’m trying really hard to use stuff up, so I can reclaim a few scraps of fridge space… which means that today I made potato salad with two whole pickled onions, chopped up and added to the hot diced potatoes so the vinegar would absorb (this being the Cook’s Illustrated tip: boil taters in salted water, then sprinkle with vinegar while hot before adding the mayo dressing). The dressing was mayo and sweet Swedish mustard in about equal parts, plus a big handful of chopped dill.
It’s pretty awesome just licked off the mixing spoon, and I have high hopes for it alongside some smoked salmon for dinner tonight.

I love pasta salad, or at least the idea of pasta salad — cool pasta, tasty accessories, simple and fresh and filling. But it’s never like that — it’s either too full of stuff, or too oily, or too bland, or too something. So I rarely make it, other than to casually toss a few selected leftovers into a bowl of cold pasta for lunch on a hot day.
But my coworker made some for our office potluck last week, with basil, mozzarella and grape tomatoes, and it was awesome. I had some more for breakfast the next day, and was again struck by the yumminess. I asked her for the recipe, and it turned out to be just as simple as it seemed to be, but somehow the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I made some last night and took it to a July 4th fireworks party, and at least 5 strangers came up to me and told me how awesome it was, so i know it’s not just me nerding out about this.
Here’s how to make it:
Boil a pound of orzo in heavily salted water. Drain and rinse and drain again. Add just enough olive oil to coat the orzo. Cut up fresh water-packed mozzarella into bite size dice (1/2″ or so) — I cut ciliegine into 4 bits each. Cut grape or cherry tomatoes in half, or in quarters if you feel like the halves are too big. Rip up a big pile of basil leaves. Mix it all into the pasta and add ground black pepper, and extra salt if it needs any (it will probably want at least a little bit). Let it sit for a while before serving for best flavors.
I think that I added a shade too much oil, so i splashed in just a little bit of rice vinegar, and i think that was a good addition, even though it wasn’t part of the original recipe. I also think that the trick is to get the flavorings in the pasta while it is warm enough to infuse the flavors, but cool enough not to cook the tomatoes or melt the cheese at all. The taste is quiet, but not bland — it’s somehow refreshing: creamy and spoonable from the orzo, basil-y throughout, and fresh from the tomatoes.
Happy Independence Day!

I ran across Just Bento, the sister site to Just Hungry (which appears to be back in action and at full force, yay — i was sad when she went away for so long awhile back), and I’ve been highly distracted by it of late. I love japanese food, but I am often overwhelmed by lack of recipes and don’t cook it at home as much as I would like. The stuff on Just Bento breaks it down and makes it seem much more simple, as I suspect it has been all along.
And reading all that got me all fired up and I cooked a bunch of stuff — lotus root kinpira, sesame-garlic spinach — and I went off on a tear to the korean market in town and came back with a bunch of stuff I totally didn’t need: magenta eggplant pickles, water-packed wild mushrooms, frozen tamagoyaki.


And that all manifested itself in last night’s dinner, consisting of rice, pickles, spinach, kinpira, soft tofu with katsuobushi & scallions & soy plus a bit of the fresh wasabi root I dragged back from Uwajimaya in Seattle, and beef & mushrooms in a soy-mirin glaze. The wasabi didn’t really need its own little dishes, but i was rushing a little and didn’t think through the plating properly. 🙂

This was delightful, and just what I felt like eating on a not-quite-warm spring evening. My husband may be of chinese origin, but i get no complaints about japanese dinners, heh. And this is the bento I made as I put away the leftovers:

Yay, bento!
PS: recipes for this stuff are in my head, which perhaps is why it all felt so much easier.
spinach: wilt baby spinach either in water or in a pan with the wash-water clinging, then squeeze out as much as you can. chop with a knife, then mix in a clove or two of fresh minced garlic (you can mush it together with some salt if you didn’t salt the cooking spinach and you want it less chunky), a teaspoon or so of sugar, and a li’l splash of toasted sesame oil. a dash of soy sauce is ok too, if it needs salt. mix together, keep in fridge. good with japanese or korean dinners – this is technically a korean recipe.
kinpira: buy a package of sliced lotus root or burdock, drain off the water, and put into a skillet with a bit of hot peanut oil. coat the veg a bit, then add braising liquid — soy sauce, sake, mirin, more or less equal amounts but in whatever proportions you like. I go a little heavy to the mirin, since i don’t add sugar and this recipe had no sweetening carrot in it. braise covered until things start looking brown – you can flip them around so all sides get equally brown, and add liquid if you don’t think they’re done enough yet. take the lid off at the end to evaporate the last of the liquid. lotus root stays crunchy, so what you’re looking for is depth of flavor and color, and absence of liquid. at the end sprinkle with shichimi togarashi (blend of sesame seeds, seaweed & hot peppers, mmmm). this time i added some chili flakes to the braising step, to see if that would give a deeper layer of hot aside from the surface heat of the shichimi togarashi sprinkle, which it did… i got this idea from the kinpira gobo i had at Maneki in Seattle which had no sprinkle at all but packed a hell of a wallop.
tofu: get a block of soft tofu and stick it in a bowl. pour over some soy sauce. when ready to serve, sprinkle over some chopped scallion and shredded katsuobushi (bonito flakes that you buy preshredded in packets). offer wasabi if you like — it’s non-traditional, but we both thought it added something nice to the flavor combo.
beef-n-shrooms: buy a bag of mixed mushrooms (or get fresh), and a sirloin tip. cut the sirloin tip up small and marinate in soy sauce & mirin for 10-30 mins as you make the rest of dinner. heat skillet to hot with some peanut oil, then add the meat, stir a bit (watch out for spattering if you are too lazy to drain it properly like i am), then add the mushrooms. dump in the rest of the marinade and cook till everything is cooked through. if you want thicker sauce, add a tsp or so of cornstarch at the very end.

[ARGH. I forgot to post this b/c it had no photos. Lame. Posting now, a month late.]

My Daddy’s birthday is coming up, and so i cooked dinner for my parents yesterday as part of his present. He’s had bouillabaisse on the brain since a few weeks ago, when he had a disappointing one at Naked Fish, which i guess was to be expected, though really it’s kind of an easy dish especially if you’ve got access to decent seafood. I knew I could do better, having made a version of it for a dinner party a few years ago, so I busted out the Joy of Cooking and got to work.

It turns out that the nice boys at the Whole Foods fish counter will give you a big plastic box full of the skeletal remains of a halibut, for free. It also turns out that this makes a huge amount of lovely fish stock once simmered for half an hour with fennel tops, leek tops, parsley stems, celery leaves and peppercorns. And furthermore it turns out that you can pick a big plateful of fishmeat off those bones when you’re done, so even though I sent all the leftover bouillabaisse home with Dad, me & tallasiandude are gonna have our own yummy fish soup tonight, made with all that free fishy goodness. Extra-thrifty cooks, take note — fish frames aren’t just for stock; if you’re not feeling fancy, you get the soup contents too.

I made the broth ahead, so that all I had to do was heat it up, chuck in the seafood, and toast the croutons. I used monkfish & halibut fillets, littlenecks, mussels, and some frozen lobster meat that Dad found on sale, and it came out great. For some reason, bouillabaisse always makes me feel like it’s summer — i think it must be the bright oranges and reds of it, or maybe it’s that I don’t eat much seafood (aside from sushi) in the colder months. Dunno, but it was a nice feeling in any case, what with the cold and the gray outside. (Quick note to self: the organic Italian bread from Whole Foods was particularly nice, because it has a finer, more uniform crumb than other kinds, which makes for a solid crouton to float.)

We had some little snacks to start (in which Dad discovered a deep and abiding love of marinated white anchovies, yum yum), and a green salad to end, and then we got on to the birthday cake course.
I have in the past had some, let us say, issues with layer cakes. At best, they usually look lopsided, like a 4 year old made them, and sometimes they just go horribly, horribly wrong, like the year that i used a fruity filling that was too runny, and between that and the overly-domed layers, the filling squirted out the sides, the layers slid around, and the entire cake ended up looking like a pile of vomit there on the cake plate. Not good. It’s still a running joke in the family, that vomit cake. Therefore I am particularly happy to report that this year’s cake went remarkably well, and wound up looking like an actual normal cake from start to finish.
All the recipes were from the 1997 edition of Joy of Cooking. I made the white cake recipe, and filled the layers with brown sugar frosting, and iced the outside with quick white icing I (the easy one, where you beat together powdered sugar, butter, and a little milk & vanilla). The cakes came out relatively flat, and the filling and icing all tasted good, not that it’s likely to go too far wrong when you mix butter and sugar, and because both icings were relatively stiff and dry, we maintained structural integrity. And then I put some purple Peeps on top, nesting in coconut. Awww. [Note: arty photo at top is of the cake, plus the fabulous spray of white orchids that my father grew and brought over, and in the foreground, the Cumulus dessert plate my brother the glassblower made and gave me for Christmas last year.]
This was the maiden voyage of my new bright-orange KitchenAid mixer, purchased with wedding-gift dollars, which has been sitting decoratively (it’s ORANGE, whee!) on the counter since we got it. I bought two bowls for it, which is totally the way to go, because then you can just cruise through all the cake making tasks without washing anything. I think maybe its super-ultra-mixing-power kind of overmixed my cake, because it was a little bit denser than I was expecting, or maybe i overfolded and crushed the whipped egg whites, but it’s all cool — it tasted good, it wasn’t dry, and now i know what to expect from the big orange beast.

Just a couple of notes to self:
– A while ago, i made some oden using the dried flavor packet you can buy at the Japanese markets. It was pretty meh. Today, i had some daikon to cook up, so i used another of the packets in a medium pot of water, but i amped it up with maybe 1/4 cup shoyu, a big splash of sake & a bigger splash of mirin. MUCH better.
– Tonight we made the Ma Po Tofu recipe from the Pei Mei cookbook volume 1. I didn’t bother deepfrying the tofu first, nor did i have the required pork — all i had was some fresh shiitake. So i just put a bunch of peanut oil into the big skillet, added the garlic & shiitake, fried them a while, then added some more peanut oil (a bit too much really) and the tofu. Then i added the spicy bean paste and soy sauce and let it all fry up for a while. Last went in the chicken broth, which i then set to boiling down. I ground the black pepper on top of the tofu and let it sit there to add flavor. The cornstarch slurry went in just at the end, when the broth was reduced but still entirely liquid. This came out VERY nice indeed, spicy and rich and with a bracing hit of fresh black pepper. The shiitake add a sweet flavor that is entirely lovely, and i would recommend this substitution for any vegetenarians wanting to make a Ma Po Tofu. I like the flavor of this at least as much as any restaurant version, and it goes together in a flash, presuming of course you have spicy bean paste in the house. Which you all should — it’s yummy and has a multitude of uses.
1 package tofu, cut in large cubes
sm package fresh shiitake, cut chunky
4 sm cloves garlic, cut rough
several tbsp peanut oil
2 tbsp spicy bean paste
2-3 tsp soy sauce
sprinkle of salt
1 cup chicken broth
lots of fresh ground black pepper
2 tsp cornstarch + 2 tsp water = slurry
chopped green onion (i didn’t have any)
also it specified to drizzle sesame oil on each serving, but since i overdid it a little on the peanut oil, i skipped it. And yes, we ate it up without taking photos. sorry, y’all.
one other note: though it’s not super spicy and has no szechuan peppercorns, and therefore perhaps is not strictly speaking an authentic szechuan recipe, the recipe from Pei Mei is very tasty. I may try goosing it a little szechuan-style next time, to see what happens.