Category: In the Kitchen

I read the smørrebrød article in Saveur and got a little bit of religion. I want to have a big smørrebrød party, and have people over and make a shitload of these things, but i worry that not everyone thinks that eel and herring is as delicious as I do. So to scratch the itch just a little bit, I got out a tin of sardines in mustard sauce that’s been kicking around the cabinets for a while, and chopped up a hardboiled egg, and put it together into a salad and spread it on brown multigrain bread, with a sprig of dill and some baby pickles. Delicious! And to make myself feel like I was eating more healthfully, I made a salad of red peppers and fennel, which bizarrely went really well with the sandwiches.

When your friend asks you to bring a dessert to a gathering, and you have a half-bag of shredded coconut, a handful of almost-overripe strawberries, and a few bananas, what do you do? You dig around in the cookbooks, decide that macaroons are not going to use up the berries, and that coconut custard pie is just too much work, and settle on a pavlova instead. Then you bike to the supermarket and buy kiwis and heavy cream, and get busy.
I used the Cook’s Illustrated Best Baking Book recipe, and the meringue came out beautiful, just perfect, but I couldn’t get it off the parchment paper when it came time to serve, so I guess it wasn’t so perfect after all. It broke all up into ugly sticky bits, but i shoved them back together and hid them under fruit and cream, and no one was the wiser save H who witnessed the whole thing. I put kiwis and strawberries and bananas onto it, drizzled it all with passionfruit puree, which is much runnier than I expected it to be, but is also so staggeringly delicious that I am putting it on every pav I ever make henceforward, and topped the works with toasted coconut. The whipped cream went on separately, because one of the guests was lactose intolerant, and the whole thing was rather well-received, happily. I was very happy with it myself, since the meringue base is very sweet but the rest of it is all just fruit and unsweetened cream, so the whole thing works once it’s together — and it’s easy to make, AND as a bonus it makes me think fondly back on my trip to New Zealand. What’s not to love?

things that i have been doing with my new skillet:
blanching snow peas
cooking white asparagus (damn pan is so big, it holds the spears real niiice)
braising pear slices in butter & maple syrup
cooking omelets
and sometime this weekend, i am going to pan fry some fish fillets. I can’t wait!

This is my new skillet. I love my new skillet. My parents dragged it in their luggage (and i do mean DRAG, sorry mom & dad!) all the way from Massachusetts to surprise me with it, for no occasion at all. I am tearing up just writing about it, because there’s a lot of meaning tied up in this particular object.
I have wanted — well, really, lusted in my heart for — a 12″ All-Clad stainless steel skillet for years now, but they’re expensive and I’ve simply done without. It’s on my list of “gifts I want someone to give me” and when my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas this year, I sent them my list — but I annotated the skillet with the note that they were not supposed to get it for me because it’s expensive, and I mostly left it on the list as a funny ha-ha.
No skillet arrived from Santa, and I thought nothing of it until I opened the box my parents brought to Chicago and completely freaked out. I was thrilled, obviously, because now i have the BEST SKILLET IN THE WORLD, but there’s more to it than that. I know my parents want to give me things and help me do the things I want to do, but there’s not enough money for them to do that the way they would like to — but by god they could get me a skillet I wouldn’t buy for myself. And so I know that this skillet means as much to my parents to give as it does to me to receive, and that makes me so happy I’m about to cry. I will think of them with love whenever I cook in it.
Which is going to be all the damn time, woo hoo!! 🙂
Here is a photo of its maiden voyage last night, in which I made a spanish tortilla out of leftover french fries from Al’s and some spicy jarred peppers:

The other day I felt like having a cookie after supper, but I didn’t have any cookies. All the baking that has been going on around here must be having an effect on my mental processes, because without even really thinking about it, I cracked open the Baking Illustrated best-recipe book and dug around for the cookie I was craving… and ideally, that I had ingredients for. And banged out a batch of totally spectacular molasses cookies, yay me. They were soft and spicy, and quite a bit like my grandma’s “aunt lila’s cookies” except not as dark brown, and moister. Good for dessert, good for breakfast. Yay cookies!

The new Penzey’s magazine, Penzey’s One, did a feature issue on New Orleans and the gulf coast, full of personal stories and photos of flood trauma, plus lots of delish-looking family recipes. (This down-homey just-folks approach is the great appeal of the magazine, which still feels a little like a high-school publishing project, but that is part of why I love it.)
So I got a hankering for the Shrimp Creole recipe in there, because it sounded simple and good, and because i had a bag of frozen raw shrimp hanging around. Saute up small-diced onion, celery and pepper (in butter lest i forget), add bay leaf and paprika and salt, pour in a can of tomatoes and simmer, then add in the shrimps, a little cornstarch slurry and some parsley. Fabu, quick and easy. I have been eating it for dinner all week with rice and broccoli, and I think it is healthy enough to be counterbalancing the Perez and Hecky’s I’ve been eating for lunches. 🙂

TNR loves to bake, so i think it is her influence that has caused me to make way more sweet pastry things than usual of late. She bought a huge pile of tiny apples for cheap at Stanley’s, then got sick and didn’t use them, so I stepped in and made a quickie apple galette with the other half of the pastry i made for the pear tart tatin. Nummy.

you make something not only full of vegetables but also containing spicy chile sauce. And eat it, AND don’t feel nasty afterwards. Praise the lord.
I had a bag of unsweetened coconut that needed using. Here is what I did with it:
made thai coconut rice (jasmine rice cooked in coconut milk + water + small slice ginger, then sprinkled with toasted coconut)
made indonesian spicy stirfry (chicken, broccoli, carrot, onion, snow pea, mango & spicy sambal – no coconut in this one)

made curried greens from a Saveur recipe that I’ve been ogling for years now. The green beans in the supermarket looked nasty, so i got mustard and turnip greens instead. This worked out awesome, since I shorted the water in the recipe a bit and instead relied on the not-fully-moistened coconut to absorb the residual water from the greens, making the final product nice and dry. I am totally making greens this way again, and I might even truck up to Devon St and see if I can find curry leaves, though the recipe is delish without them.

made a german chocolate cake – since TNR can’t eat sugar or dairy, i took it on as a challenge to find a way to make German Chocolate Cake she could eat. We used unsweetened coconut, made a maple+butter+florida crystals frosting (thickened up by cornstarch and the dried coconut), and did the chocolate cake recipe from the current issue of Cook’s Illustrated, swapping applesauce 1 for 1 with the sour cream and cocoa+oil for the solid chocolate. (Who knew unsweetened chocolate had milk solids in it?) The cake came out awesome, very moist and fluffy and chocolaty — the recipe is a bit fiddly, but worth the trouble.

it’s been a while since I posted. Sorry about that — came down with a lovely case of salmonella whilst in California for a company meeting. This is day 6 of the horror, and the first day I’ve had any appetite at all. Honestly, the gorier aspects of salmonella are bad enough, but being in San Francisco with no appetite is truly wretchedness. Now that I’m home, I’ve got a fridge full of cheese and a bowl of lovely fruit I’ve been utterly uninterested in eating for days. Awful. Truly awful.
Last night, when I started to think about what could be done about the new roommate’s overripe pears, I knew I was on the road to recovery. Tonight, when I made — and eventually even ATE, yay me! — this pear tart tatin, I knew things were well on their way back to sanity.

The new roommate (TNR?) can’t eat white sugar, so this was a maple syrup based tart, and I have to say, I recommend it to everyone. A bit of cornstarch thickens it up the last little bit, and the maple adds a terrific depth of flavor to the caramel. Yumminess.

When I got back from holiday break on January 3, I had a bunch of leftovers from the familial celebrations, and there were a few things kicking around the kitchen after the roommate’s departure. And I was exhausted and busy, and didn’t really get around to grocery shopping, and I kept cobbling together meals from what I had, and finally it occurred to me that considering how jam-packed my cupboards were (compared to my nearly-empty refrigerator), I should make a game out of it and see how long I could go without buying any food whatsoever. (This is what happens to you when you are a foodwhore and squirrel away treats and ingredients in every spare corner of your kitchen.)
And thus was born The Experiment. I decided that I should make a special dispensation for buying milk, since you can’t exactly stockpile fresh milk, and that I could be allowed the occasional meal out, since refusing social interaction for the sake of a pretty nerdy self-experiment seemed somehow wrong. Here are the stats:
half gallons of milk: 2, plus pint heavy cream for making sherbert
lunches out w/ coworkers or at clientsite: 2
Perez lunches: 5 — it was cold, i needed soups! (this was the closest i got to cheating, because invariably Perez yields a bounty of leftover tortillas and at least 2 meals per purchase)
fancy dinners I didn’t pay for: 2
weekend w/ MG visiting: 4 meals out total (tacos –> leftover nopalitos & refritos & tortillas)
weekend w/ELF visiting: 4 meals out total (dinner –> ribs & fries I ate for lunch later)
Except for these meals and the leftovers they occasionally generated, I went from January 3 to February 3 without buying any food at all. NO FOOD BUYING FOR 30 DAYS, and I cooked all the freaking time. I could have gone longer but the fry fest was on February 3 and I had to get things for that. After that, I ate more leftovers and cabinet contents, and didn’t really and truly do a grocery shop until yesterday, when I went batshit at Stanley’s and bought 20 bucks worth of vegetables.
I suspect that I got mildly malnourished during this experiment. I’ve been tired and cranky, and feeling almost sick, for a week or so if not more, and I’m craving fruit and vegetables — i keep buying nutrient-rich juices on impulse — and craving chicken, which is light and low in fat unlike all the heavy winter pastas and beans and meats I’ve been eating. I really didn’t eat enough fruit & veg the last two months, certainly not enough vitamin C except for the limes that come with meals at Perez. I’m really happy about the beet salad in my fridge and the rutabaga mash I’m having for lunch and the broccoli I’m going to have this weekend.
Here’s what I had to work with, beyond staples like flour and spices and oil:
frozen thai meatballs from roommate’s mom
frozen veg – asparagus & broccoli
frozen salmon & shrimp
canned beans
canned tuna
canned fancy wild salmon & razor clams & oysters from my dad over a year ago
box of mushroom soup
eggs
2 dogs/buns from roommate
radicchio & parsley
limes from tallasiandude’s mom’s tree
leftover lamb leg from roommate’s bon voyage dinner
leftover bread
kimchi & rice-pucks
2 kinds of salumi leftover from brother’s xmas gift to me
scraps of cheese
yogurts
cookies & crackers from holidays, including 2 boxes of pb & cheese sandwich crackers
brownies
dates stuffed with walnuts
2 carrots & 1 onion
1 large red kuri squash
jar of moroccan carrot spread
jar of pickled mushrooms
3 lbs rotini, whole wheat & regular
jar red roasted peppers
can olives
broth & tomatoes in cans
dried fruits
Here’s a sampling of what I made and ate during this experiment:
cold lamb w/ baguette & spicy carrot spread
spicy lamb stew w/ beans, carrot, tomato w/ stale-baguette toasts or tortilla toasts
cereal + milk, till the cereal ran out
cookies, brownies, yogurts for breakfasts
lunches & dinners of sandwich crackers + chocolate bonbons from dad
tuna w/ jalapeno, beans, peppers, with crostini crackers
lamb broth w/ whole wheat rotini, lamb shreds & meatballs

eggs w/ birria meat & parsley & pickled nopalitos, with leftover beans & reheated tortillas = brunch for 2
gratin of stale bread, peppery salumi & strong italian cheese, w/ eggs & leftover cream
Trader Joe’s soycutash with nopalitos & leftover pico de gallo, tortilla chips
soycutash with birria meat & nopalitos
mushroom soup with various croutons & chips and other junk
canned wild salmon mixed with mayo, eaten on some sort of starch (surprisingly good for canned salmon)

salmon w/ pasta/asparagus/radicchio/garlic, with sprouted onion garnish – this salmon was frozen, from Trader Joe’s

pasta w/ tuna in oil, roast peppers, parmesan olives, last of the parsley & sprouted onion

kimchi treat with pucks & freezerburned bacon & frozen shrimps (made w/ piloncillo instead of brown sugar – came out very yum)
crazy rice plain, also crazy rice re-cooked with cream & piloncillo
hot dogs w/ spicy mustard & homemade pickles

limeade & lime sherbert from at least 4 pounds of limes
More recently it’s been packaged ramen with defrosted thai meatballs and fish cake, and carrots scavenged from the bottom of the bin. That and a big pan of another gratin of squash, mole-salumi and mozzarella leftover from fry fest.

Seriously, it’s amazing how many awesome meals can be made from what at first glance appears to be nothing. Granted, eating sandwich crackers and nothing else for lunch is perhaps more than is called for by simple thrift, but I have given myself a new resolve to eat only from what I have until what I have is gone, and ONLY THEN to go food shopping. We’ll see how I do — I’m like a magpie, except that instead of shiny objects I get distracted by fabulous condiments and pretty cuts of meat and exotic vegetables.