Category: In the Kitchen

latest version of my salmon cake improvisation came out pretty good, so i guess i better write it down.
packet of salmon
1/4 red pepper, minced
few parsley leaves, minced
green onion, minced
teaspoon or so Old Bay seasoning
teaspoon or so Tamazula hot sauce
3 tbsp miracle whip (lower fat version is just fine)
1 egg
1/4 cup dry breadcrumbs
ground black pepper
Mix all together well, then form into 4 balls. Roll in more breadcrumbs mixed with more Old Bay seasoning. Mist olive oil into nonstick pan, heat to medium, and fry — spray the patties with some oil, too, and spray the pan again whenever you flip. These end up not as fabulously golden as if you fried them in 1/8″ of oil, but much less fat going down the gullet makes it easier to handle a couple of dry breadcrumbs in an otherwise delightfully crunchy crust. Summer’s coming, y’all, and some of us have been eating a little too much cheese. And bacon. And beer. And bread. *grin* Oooh, and I had these with the last of parents’ asparagus and the first of my garden’s baby arugula. Yummy.

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.

I am staying with my dear friend H in Chicago until I can find a place to live, and this Friday her husband J had some people over for an impromptu dinner, and for this he whipped up his signature arroz con pollo. Oh, yeah, yum yum yum.
He makes it with a whole bunch of cilantro pureed in the blender with a bit of water, and puts this in with the rice, the chicken thigh sauteed with onions & turmeric, the sweet red peppers, and the edamame (his twist on the usual peas). The whole thing comes out soft and savory and a most springlike yellow-green color. Comfort food at its finest, especially when paired with the incendiary tomato salad that H made to go with it. She makes this insane spice paste with vats of habaneros (perhaps I did not blog about the bagful of gorgeous orange ones she bought in October; she’s already blown through those and this is a new batch), and she used a scant dollop of this to make the dressing for her tomatoes and onions. On its own that salad will send smoke out your ears, but mixed into the rice & chicken it’s a lovely little zing to contrast with the soft moist starch. The radish salad was not an attack salad, but rather a nice tangy peppery crunch for texture. A lovely meal and a lovely evening.

Lunch today was cobbled together from pasta, jar sauce, and frozen costco hamburgers. Is it wrong to use a frozen patty as a meatball?

Every March, the markets get in the gray corned beef, and therefore I make boiled dinner. There is not much from the WASPy side of my family that’s worthy of a foodslut’s repertoire, but this one is top-notch.
The thing to bear in mind is that you need to get gray corned beef, not red. My mother maintains that the red doesn’t taste as good, and I tend to agree. Interestingly, my friend who joined us this year for boiled dinner said she normally doesn’t like the salty meat when her family makes this dish, but that the meat we had was much better, not as salty and strong. I suspect that this is because we use the gray: the gray has no saltpeter in it. The saltpeter is what keeps the red style from turning gray during its brining time. Sadly, you can almost never get gray corned beef outside of St. Patrick’s Day season, and it is even harder to find outside of New England, I am told.
Take large piece of gray corned beef and put in a large pot full of water, lots and lots of water. Add a handful of black peppercorns and a bay leaf. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook at least 2 hours. Skim off the crud as it rises. Top off liquid with more water as needed. Once the meat has floated, that seems to be the indicator that it’s done, and it’s time to add vegetables. Pull out the meat and turn the heat back up to bring the liquid to a boil. I like to use potatoes, carrots, rutabagas, and parsnips, all cut into biggish chunks. Once the veggies are soft and nearly done, after 40 min or so, add wedges of green cabbage. If these are holding together well on their own, just chuck them in, but if they are coming apart you can fix this with a couple of toothpicks stuck in each to hold them together. The cabbage takes 10 or 15 minutes to get nice and soft. Once it’s all done, add the meat back in to warm it up.
To serve, fish the meat out and slice against the grain. (Remove any slabs of fat you don’t want to eat.) Fish the veggies out of the broth and plate along with the sliced beef. Everything is nicely salted and seasoned by its long bath with the salted meat. Spicy mustard goes well with this dish, as does beer. The leftover broth makes fantastic quick-n-easy soups, so be sure to save it.

Tonight’s kale came out really good, probably my favorite greens version so far, so I have to write it down so I don’t forget what I did.
Slice 3 or 4 cloves of garlic, and large-dice half a large (or 1 small) onion, and small-dice half a red pepper. Slice a bunch of kale into half-inch shreds. Heat a bit of olive oil in a deep frypan, and saute the onion, sprinkling with a pinch of salt, then add the garlic and pepper and saute until soft. Sprinkle with red pepper flakes to taste. Put in the kale and wilt it so you can fit the whole bunch in the pan. Sprinkle with a generous amount of salt — this appears to be key, since I used more than I often might. Once it’s wilted, add a can of chicken broth (low sodium). Cook until kale is tender and dark green, but not yet olive green. Cover it if you like, to keep it from drying out. When it’s done, add some hot sauce — I used a bit of insane-o habanero jamaican stuff and a few dashes of Frank’s Louisiana hot sauce. Grind a little black pepper over it. It’s spicy and tangy, and savory from the chicken broth & salt. Nummy with pasta mixed in, or over rice.