Category: In the Kitchen

sometimes when the world is just too horrible, you need something comforting. And more often than not, especially for tallasiandude and increasingly for me, that thing is spicy korean ramen, with egg poached in it. Takes 5 minutes, costs a dollar, and is hot and soupy and spicy and brothy goodness. It’s gotta be this particular kind of ramen, though, or it’s not as good. And lately I’ve started putting in carrots and canned tomato as well, which makes it into more of a stew.

For the second summer running, I’ve been eating variations of this dish practically every other day since the beginning of August. Can’t resist it. Tomatoes, corn cut off the cob, some kind of cheese, vinegar & oil, salt & pepper, plus other stuff as available: herbs, zucchini, peppers, whatever. Takes less than 5 minutes to throw together, ingredients hold well over the course of a busy week, intensely satisfying yet light and healthy.
This version was super-extra-fancy: red & green zebra tomatoes, corn, blanched zucchini, feta, parsley and minced jalapenos. Yum.

Based vaguely on the puffy corn omelet in Gourmet this month, except that i can’t be bothered to separate and beat the eggs, so my omelet ain’t puffy. But it sure is tasty.
3 cobs corn, cooked (I wrap mine in saran wrap and microwave a few minutes, wicked easy)
4 eggs, beaten with a pinch of salt & ground black pepper and a splash of milk
4 tbsp butter
handful of chives or garlic chives, chopped
handful of dill, chopped
Preheat oven to 350F. Melt the butter in an ovenproof skillet. Leave the heat around medium and cut and scrape the corn from the cobs into the skillet & stir to break up. Before it all gets absorbed, pour in the eggs and add the herbs, and stir the whole works to distribute evenly. Bung it in the oven for 20-30 minutes or until the middle is all cooked solid. Cool in the pan and then cut into wedges to serve hot, cold or room temperature.

I read a recipe for curried egg salad somewhere recently that sounded good, but i couldn’t lay my hand on it when it turned out there was no protein in the house save 8 eggs, so I winged it and came up a winner.
Of course, I have tried and tried to come up with a way to make this very tasty egg salad into a Harry Potter extravaganza, but I got nothing, even though I’ve just read the Half-Blood Prince and am struggling with the urge to read it again. This dish is delicious enough to have been conjured up for one of the Hogwarts banquets, but really I think the children tend to get rather heartier dishes from the house-elves than my poncy curried egg salad on toast. Since it’s yellow and red when you include the tomato salad, I thought it might vaguely resemble Gryffindor colors, but that’s a pretty lame stretch. It’s curried, and therefore vaguely British, but that’s even lamer. I’m an English major, and I love horrible puns, I should be able to do better than this. And having struggled with this now for longer than it took me to cook the dish and write it up in the first place, I’m beginning to think that perhaps requiring a theme is in fact antithetical to the original spirit of the EoMEoTE, the oh-fuck-it-I’m-broke desperation that spawned the genre. But as long as you let me whine on about the theme instead of actually being clever about it, just as you let me put my egg in the same room with the toast rather than actually upon it, then it all works out just as it should. *grin*
8 hardboiled eggs, diced
handful of cooked green beans, cut into bitesize bits
half a small red onion, diced fine
1 tbsp mayo
2 tbsp miracle whip
lots and lots of madras curry powder, to taste
black pepper
few shots of louisiana hot sauce
chopped cilantro
salt (save till the end, because once you get enough curry powder in there to make it taste of curry, you may not need any salt at all)
Mix all this together. Serve with toasted slices of sourdough bread and a sliced tomato salad. Serves 3-4 depending on hunger. Makes a very nice lunch or cold summer dinner, especially if made ahead and kept in the fridge.

Pan grilled a bison steak and managed to get it just perfectly medium rare with a nice crispy crust. Delish. Made a fennel-cabbage slaw based on one in Gourmet magazine, and took some leftover yukon golds in mustard vinaigrette and put the rest of the chimichurri into it to make tangy herbed smashed potatoes. Woo, baby – yum!
half a savoy cabbage, shredded fine
one fennel bulb, shredded fine
some of the fennel fronds, chopped
handful of parsley, chopped
shallot, sliced fine
2 carrots, grated
Mix 2 big spoonfuls of mayo with a couple tablespoons sherry vinegar & a bit of salt to combine, squeeze half a lemon and grind a bunch of black pepper over the veggies, and stir it all to combine. Let it sit in the fridge a while to blend flavors. Crisp, refreshing, clean, and tangy — very nice indeed.

So after years of reading about sour cherries and how completely transcendent they are, but never seeing any in the markets, I finally ran across some at the Federal Plaza farmer’s market this week, so obviously I bought them.
I pitted them with a star pastry tip (which by the way is a pretty efficient method), and tasted a few of them raw, expecting them to be superpuckery and not really edible, but I really liked them. They’re different from sweet cherries, but in their own tangy way really yummy. I would totally eat them raw as a snack or a dessert. Which is good, because once they were cooked and put into the tart (which by a bizarre miracle actually came out right), they left me mostly cold. I mean, they’re good, but just kind of meh — they taste like a more delicious, fresh version of canned cherry filling. Which I guess is what they are, but still… kind of boring. I don’t really get the hype. I’ll totally buy them again, but next time I ain’t cookin’ ’em.

I got some rhubarb from the parents when i was last at the homestead, and I intended to make a pie as I always do in June. But I am so busy, and I never managed to muster the energy for a pie, but Gourmet considerately provided a rhubarb sorbet recipe, so I made that instead, with the addition of a bit of alcohol for texture. It’s a vaguely mauve color, and tangy sweet. It got a little frozen on the innards of the icecream maker, so i wonder if perhaps I didn’t use enough alcohol — the triple sec in the apartment smelled a little cheep-boozy, so I didn’t want to use too much. But deelishus, and easy, and less fattening than pie anyway. Mmmmmm….
(again, sorry no photo. But I served this to H&J on the roofdeck, and we have learned another useful thing: rhubarb sorbet is made even better when served with 2% greek yogurt sweetened with a bit of sugar. The yogurt with sugar reminds me a lot of skyr, possibly the single most spinetinglingly delicious Icelandic food product. And every time I have had a rhubarb dessert involving dairy, it has been over the top delicious. So I think that now, just as I pretty much always have some cheddar cheese with my apple pie, I will pretty much always have some sweet dairy with my cooked rhubarb. And then I will pretend I am in England in the spring. *giggle*)

beets with tarragon, not so good. the flavor is weird — tarragon is better on chicken and in moosewood-style gazpacho.
yukon gold potatoes with dill & creme fraiche, really really good. YUM.
indiana buffalo ribeye, strongly flavored but quite tasty.
beet greens with onion & mustard seed, fine but meh. only used mustard seed because bizarrely there is no mustard in this house, but it didn’t lend much flavor. I probably should have thought of it before i started cooking, so i could have toasted the seeds in oil.
have you guessed? I went to the farmer’s market. *grin*

Leftover rice topped with a bunch of sriracha and some cheddar cheese is bizarrely delicious and satisfying. It’s better if there’s a fried egg involved as well as it was earlier in the week (hmm, does this count as an eomeote entry?), but when dashing out the door en route to a dinnertime flight, this gets the job done and right quick.

My brother sent a whole filleted Copper River salmon to my father for Fathers’ Day, with strict instructions for cooking the treasure. Being generous and kind, the parents brought the fishy to my house in Waltham to share. Yay!
We fired up the weber kettle and oiled the fish lightly, and laid it out whole on the grill, skin side down, and tented it with foil. We were told not to touch it whatsoever until such time as it was starting to flake and there was a thin line of dark red (raw) still running down the middle, and then to remove it from the coals, tent it again on the platter, and let it sit a few minutes, then eat. It came out perfectly cooked, tender, moist, flavorful. Just lovely. We had it with russet potatoes and vidalia onions roasted in foil in the coals, garden asparagus, challah rolls (from Costco, and yummy), and mixed salad, again from the gardens. We also had a starter course of sauteed chinese cabbage, shiitake mushrooms, and mung bean vermicelli, cooked in a bit of chicken broth & soy sauce.
Dessert was a bit of a disaster (I guess it runs in the family), since Mom’s blueberry cupcakes failed to rise, and her intended frosting of vanilla sauce (which I had bought for Dad some years ago; it got hidden in the cupboards & forgotten) turned out to not only be stale, but to have been revolting in the first place — super thick and sticky, kind of like plastic. But there was ice cream, and the cupcakes tasted good once you scraped off the nasty goo. Happy Fathers’ Day!