Cucumber, Tomato and Feta Salad

This is yet another dish to make use of the delicious summer tomato bounty.  Boring, huh?  I know.  It's just a salad.  And not even a particularly inventive one as isn't a huge departure from other Greek-ish tomato and cucumber salads we have made in the past, including this Tomato, Cucumber and Red Onion Salad with Mint.  But I can't get enough of salad/veggies this week and I can't get enough of the delicious tomatoes from the farmers' market.  It is tasty nonetheless and just different enough that I thought it was worth posting.  I would say that the lemon-based vinaigrette and the scallions are much gentler on the palate than the red wine vinegar-based vinaigrette and red onions.  So if you want a more subtle salad (with a punch of saltiness from the olives), this would be a better bet.  It's fresh and easy - the perfect side dish for a bit Greek-inspired meal because you can prep it and throw most of it together while cooking other things and then just toss in the feta and the dressing at the very end when you are ready to serve. 

Recipe after the jump!

Pork Shoulder Adobo

If I am not mistaken, this is the fourth version of adobo that Alex and I have made.  We made two versions of chicken adobo and then one pork belly adobo.  This recipe is loosely based on our second attempt at chicken adobo, which I called Chicken Adobo, Take Two.  Up until now, that was by far my favorite adobo we had made.  Now I am torn between whether this recipe or the chicken version was better.  This version is really really good.  I have to issue a disclaimer with that statement.  Usually I blog about recipes the night after we make them, which doesn't leave me time to sample the leftovers to see if they are even better than the initial meal.  In this case, Alex made the adobo during the hurricane while I was in St. Louis, so I never had the opportunity to try the freshly cooked initial meal.  All I had access to was the leftovers after they sat in the fridge for a few days.  And the leftovers were delicious - vinegary, slightly spicy and very flavorful.  Marinating the meat overnight, in addition to braising it in the marinade, really helped to intensify the flavors of the adobo.  The pork shoulder itself is really tender, although some of the less fatty pieces got a little dry (particularly when reheated in the microwave).  Alex admits that the flavors have melded and improved as the adobo sat in the fridge.  I believe he said that the flavors become more "complex."  To be perfectly honest I don't really know which one was better and I don't really care.  All I know is that Alex and I have found an amazing adobo recipe - one that I intend to use for years and years to come with both chicken and pork shoulder.

Recipe after the jump!

Steamed Shrimp

This is a dish that reminds me of summers in Maryland.  Any dish with plenty of Old Bay and shrimp is redolent of a summer in Maryland.  The only thing missing is a few blue crabs.  But when I was growing up we ate steamed shrimp far more than we ever ate crabs.  So when I picked up some nice shell on wild shrimp I decided that it was past time to make myself some steamed shrimp like my mom used to make.  I took a page from Louisiana-style shrimp boils and threw the potatoes and the corn in with the shrimp.  When we ate this growing up my mom would steam the corn and roast the potatoes separately, but if I can cut down on the number of pots and pans we use I am all about it.  Plus if you put in a base layer of potatoes and corn you don't even need to use a steamer basket because the shrimp is on top of the base and out of the liquid!  It's pure genius.  And it results in perfectly cooked corn and shrimp.  Yum.  The only thing that could make this dish better or more summery is eating it outside on a deck at sundown on a table covered in newspaper.  Somehow eating it inside a NYC apartment on a dining table just didn't have the same feel to it.

Recipe after the jump!

Slow-Baked Salmon with Lemon and Thyme

After a few crazy weeks at work and a weekend in St. Louis I am back in the game!  It feels so great to be back in the kitchen again.  Sunday night when I talked to Alex I told him that I was dying for salad and healthy food.  The past few weeks I had been eating crap and over the weekend in St. Louis I ate like a kid again - Chick-fil-A (which was absolutely delicious), turkey sandwiches on white bread with mustard, Doritos and cheeseburgers.  It was all awesomely nostalgic and tasty, but by the end of the weekend my system was crying uncle.  If things had gone as planned, I would have been back in NYC Sunday night eating salad, but to make a long story short the hurricane hit and my flight back to NYC on Sunday was canceled due to the hurricane, which resulted in my boarding a flight to DC and then taking the bus up to NYC today.  Once I got to NYC I was all about salad and seafood, both of which I haven't had in far too long.

This recipe was one that I saw in Bon Appetit earlier this summer.  I am always trying new salmon recipes, even though I am fairly well convinced that no salmon recipe could possibly be better than Tyler Florence's Salt and Pepper Salmon.  Even though I don't think I can beat that recipe, I keep gathering new salmon recipes to try.  I have a recipe from Mark Bittman for Four-Spice Salmon that is next on my list.  I guess hope springs eternal that one day I will find the absolute perfect salmon recipe.  This recipe was nice, and very different from most of the other recipes we have tried, but it still can't compare.  I liked the flavors of the thyme and lemon with the salmon.  I also liked how moist the salmon stayed from roasting it at such a low temperature.  But the flavors of the lemon and thyme mixture didn't penetrate down into the fish was much as I would have hoped.  So if you got a bite of salmon that didn't have any of the lemon and thyme mixture on it, the salmon was fairly bland.  But if you had a bite with the lemon and thyme mixture, it was very flavorful.  I guess there are two solutions to that problem: (1) make more of the lemon and thyme mixture and rub it all over the sides of the salmon as well as the top and (2) marinate the salmon in the mixture in the refrigerator overnight.  I'm not sure which option is the better one.  I suppose you could hedge your bets and do both.  All things considered it's not a bad recipe, but I have other salmon recipes that I prefer.  And the search continues...

Recipe after the jump!

Chicken and Cellophane Noodle Soup (Mien Ga)

This recipe is a variation on the Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup that is one of my favorite comfort foods.  Whenever I am sick or otherwise down, there are few dishes that I find as satisfying as my mom's Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup (or my own version of the dish).  And after working like a maniac all month I was ready for some comfort food.  So I suggested my soup.  But Alex was more interested in trying something new so we decided to make a similar recipe from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen that I had been meaning to try.  And somehow we had everything we needed.  That almost never happens when I randomly suggest a recipe at 8:00 pm.

After eating the soup, I decided that this soup is more of a winter soup, while my mom's soup strikes me as more summery.  The flavors in my mom's soup are a little lighter and fresher, whereas I thought the broth here was somehow deeper and a little less bright.  Part of reason that this broth lacks the freshness and brightness of the other soup is that we essentially used boxed chicken stock, fish sauce, and some soaking liquid from the dried mushrooms as the broth.  And dried mushrooms are kinda deeply umami and heavy.  In my mom's soup I tend to throw in various aromatics (lemongrass, shallot, ginger are typical) in a base of water with some chicken bouillon mixed in.  I tend to throw some fresh shiitakes in while the broth is simmering, which I prefer to the reconstituted dried mushrooms.  Another reason that this soup wasn't as bright and fresh was that we were ran out of fresh cilantro.  I think that a nice sprinkle of cilantro would have really done something for the dish.  To try and brighten the broth up a little Alex and I ended up squeezing in some fresh lime juice, which I thought really helped to give the broth a little more depth of flavor.  For whatever reason, I like the lighter broth better.  It wasn't that this broth lacked flavor, it was just that I preferred the other.  And a certain amount of that can be attributed to nostalgia - there are certain dishes that my mom used to make that I will forever prefer over all other versions.  This might just be one of them.  But, one thing that I really did like about this soup was that the chicken was poached and then shredded.  I really liked the texture of the shredded chicken over the chunks of sliced chicken I usually throw in.  I think I will appropriate that element from this recipe for future chicken soup recipes.  Alex liked the rich, earthy flavor of the dried mushrooms, so maybe we will make Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup in the future with both fresh and dried mushrooms.  While I prefer my mom's recipe for soup over this one, I really like that this recipe gave me something to think about (and ways to improve upon her recipe although I won't tell her that) when I make my mom's recipe in the future.  And I am intrigued by the idea of combining my favorite elements of the two recipes (with some homemade chicken stock) to come up with something better and greater than either recipe could be on its own.

Recipe after the jump!

Avocado Squash Stir-Fried With Garlic

Home for dinner two nights in a row?  Unheard of (at least this month)!  Yet somehow I made it home for dinner again.  Did I mention that we are on track for the lamest month ever in terms of cooking and blogging about it?  I think with this post we will only have 10 for the entire month of August.  And I am out of town next weekend, plus I am going to be busy at work this week (but hopefully not too busy to make it home for dinner at least once or twice).  Anyway, since Alex wasn't planning on my being home for dinner (and neither was I to be perfectly honest) we didn't really have anything planned.  He had defrosted the rest of the Panfried Pork and Scallion Mini Buns for his own dinner and it was pouring outside by the time we were ready to think about what to make, so we ended up just making those.  But seeing as I have been dining solely on restaurant food (with the exception of last night) for the past two weeks, I really wanted some sort of simple, homemade, vegetable side dish to go with our buns.  The only veggies we had in the fridge were two little avocado squash (pictured above) that I picked up at the farmer's market last week.  I had never seen or heard of avocado squash before stumbling across them at the farmer's market, but they were interesting enough to pique my interest.  So I bought them.  The description the farmer provided was that they were similar to zucchini only more tender, buttery and a little sweeter.  I was going to cut them in thin slices and grill them in the grill pan before drizzling them with evoo, crushed red pepper flakes, a little lemon juice and some fresh mint.  But when we were trying to come up with an Asian-ish squash side dish to go with our mini buns, I thought of a simple Chinese zucchini recipe that I had seen some time ago in a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook. 

So this recipe is one that you could probably use with any type of firm-fleshed squash and it would yield similar results.  It was fine, but not amazing.  With that said, Alex and I ate an entire plateful so it couldn't have been that bad.  I really just wanted a recipe that wouldn't obscure the flavor of this particular squash so I went with the simplest recipe I could find.  I'm not sure that this recipe highlighted the squash exactly, but I thought that it was simple enough that I could really taste and appreciate the buttery flavor and silky texture of the avocado squash.  I'm definitely going to try to head to the farmer's market again this week to see if I can find more squash because it is really nice.  It lacks the firmness of a zucchini so I think you have to be fairly careful (and gentle) with how you cook it.  I'm very interested in trying this recipe from the NY Times for Cumin-Scented Summer Squash Salad with a mix of zucchini and avocado squash, just to see and taste the two kinds of squash together.

Recipe after the jump!

Thai Basil Chicken (Gai Pad Krapow)

Look!  I finally made it home for dinner!  I haven't been ignoring you guys for the past week.  I have been eating dinner at my desk (along with breakfast and lunch).  But I made it home tonight!  Granted, I didn't make it home until 10:00 pm so it was a late dinner, but I made it home!  And Alex waited until I was in the car headed home from work before cooking dinner for both of us.  Isn't he a nice husband?  I told him to go ahead and cook/eat while I was still at the office (and really, where else but NYC would you be at work on a Saturday and be downright excited to leave the office by 10:00 pm?), but he decided to wait for me anyway.  Like I said - don't I have a nice husband?

Anyway, for my first home-cooked meal in over a week, this was an excellent choice.  It was amazing.  It had such a great balance of spice, sweetness, and the aromatic freshness of the Thai basil.  And the flavors were so authentically Thai.  Thank you Rasamalaysia for the recipe that we based our dish on.  I order a version of this dish quite often from a Thai restaurant near my office and this version is every bit as good.  And I don't make that claim lightly.  It really was that good.  I was a little shocked by how delicious it was.  I picked up the Thai basil that we used for this dish last week at the farmers' market and I have been just dying to make this dish ever since.  I was really worried that the Thai basil would be long past its prime by the time I had a night off from work and could eat dinner at home.  Luckily the basil was just fine - better than fine actually.  The heady perfume and flavor of the basil really permeated the entire dish.  It was just glorious.   And not only was it glorious, it was remarkably easy to make.  Once you have the dish prepped it comes together very quickly and with very little effort.  And it doesn't require a ton of ingredients.  Hurray for a very successful home-cooked meal!  And here's to hoping that fairly soon work will calm down for me and we will be able to cook more at home.  Fingers crossed.

Recipe after the jump!

Tomato, Mozzarella & Thai Basil Crostini

I am going to dive right into this post by proclaiming this my favorite dish that we have made in the past few weeks and certainly my favorite dish this month.  The Pasta with Sun Gold Tomatoes was a close second, but I just really loved everything about this crostini.  The combination of ingredients sounds a little weird because who has ever heard of an Asian-inspired caprese salad?  Actually, I have now that I think about it.  David Chang has a recipe for a Cherry Tomato Salad in the Momofuku cookbook (see this post on Momofukufor2).  But it uses tofu instead of mozzarella and shiso instead of basil.  Moving on.  Sesame oil and rice vinegar with mozzarella?  Not to mention Thai basil?  Weird.  But so very delicious.  Be a little judicious about the amount of garlic you rub on your toast because the garlic can taste a little abrasive against the other, more delicate flavors.  I went a little heavy-handed on my first few crostinis before I realized just how much garlic I was using.  Oops.  Even so it was amazing.  I loved it.  I believe I called it "pretty F-ing fabulous."  I admit it.  Sometimes I have a potty mouth.  But sometimes a little profanity is in order.

While I am at it, I'm also going to dive right in and say that this is probably my last post of the week.  Or at least until Saturday.  And for those of you who want to know why the answer is simple.  I don't think I will be eating dinner anywhere but my desk until this weekend at the earliest.  And I haven't eaten dinner away from my desk since last Friday so I havne't been able to stock up on posts.  Posting this weekend might be a tad optimistic, but if I am not at the office I will do my best!  At least I am leaving you all with a delicious post before I disappear again.  And at least I am taking a break from working to do so?


Recipe after the jump!

Salmon with Lemon-Pepper Sauce and Watercress-Herb Salad

Look!  No brown!  Well, a little brown but there is only so much I can do about the color of my dining room table.  But it's still a pretty dish, huh?  Salmon and greens look so pretty together.  There were supposed to be lemons on this dish too, which would have been even prettier, but we ran out.  Oops.  This is what happens when I am busy with work.  Suddenly we run out of staples.  Right now we are out of lemons, scallions and coffee (which Alex would consider a staple and I would not).  But we have plenty of yogurt, sandwich bread, peanut butter, OJ and ice cream (Alex's staples) because he ran out and stocked up yesterday.  I go to the grocery store for things like salmon, pomegranate seeds, dark chocolate and cockles.  And then I go to the farmers' market for tomatoes, fresh corn, and other randomness (like the lemon basil, Thai basil and avocado squash I picked up today).  Alex goes to the grocery for yogurt and sandwich bread.  Clearly we have different priorities.  Haha.  Every household needs someone like Alex to buy the bare necessities for daily survival and someone like me to keep track of what we have, what we need and then go to the grocery store and buy all sorts of randomness.  You never know when you might need some creme fraiche for example.  Speaking of creme fraiche, that ugly white smear to the left of the salmon is the creme fraiche-based lemon pepper sauce for the salmon.  See?  It totally comes in handy.

This salmon dish was one of the more interesting meals we have made recently.  The salmon on its own is more than a little sweet.  But when you take a bite with the watercress-herb salad, it works really well.  The same thing goes for the lemon-pepper sauce.  All of the components are a little overpowering (in one way or another) on their own, but they work together really well when you combine them all.  The sweet, richness of the salmon gets balanced against the freshness and acidity of the watercress-herb salad, which is then balanced against the brightness of the lemon-pepper sauce.  Somehow it all works.  Is it my favorite salmon dish ever?  No.  But it's pretty and it's tasty.

Recipe after the jump!

Italian Bison Burger

I just realized how brown all of my recent posts have been.  And I guess this one is pretty brown too, but at least you get the red of the tomato and the green of the fresh basil leaves, right?  So it's not TOO brown.  Just a little bit brown...  I promise to get some color on here soon that isn't brown!  Maybe tomorrow?  Or maybe tonight.  I do have some pretty exciting recipes planned out for this evening.  Anyway, I know we make a lot of burgers.  We can't help it.  Or I can't.  Burgers are easy to make, easy to play with, and satisfying to eat.  You can use whatever ground meat you have on hand and season it in any way you wish.  I know in the past we have made Korean-inspired burgers, Vietnamese-inspired burgers, Japanese burgers...  Actually, it looks like we have managed to hit all of Asia and very little of Europe.  This time we made an Italian-inspired burger with lots of fresh basil, fresh mozzarella, prosciutto and a really nice beefsteak tomato from the farmer's market.  Nothing groundbreaking, but a nice meal.  And since we used ground bison instead of ground beef it's not actually that unhealthy!

Recipe after the jump!

Fried Meatballs and Simple Cucumber Salad

Sorry for being so delinquent lately.  Work has been really crazy.  But I have a few posts that are teed up and ready to go, so you guys can expect a flurry of posts over the next 4-5 days!  Hurray!  This meal was one of Alex's picks.  Actually, the Fried Meat Balls were his pick and the Simple Cucumber Salad was mine.  I had asked him to figure out a recipe to use up the rest of the ground pork in the fridge and this recipe from Rasamalaysia was what he came up with.  And since Alex rarely comes up with recipes that he wants to make I decided to go with it, even though I was a little skeptical.  Don't get me wrong - I love pork, I love meatballs and I love Chinese food.  So I'm not exactly sure what there was to be skeptical about with the exception of the name.  "Fried Meatballs" sounds a little weird and a lot heavy.  So I decided to make this cucumber salad to counteract that heaviness inherent in both meaty food and fried food.  According to Chinese tradition cucumbers are "cooling" (which to me means fresh and light).  I tend to pair cucumber salads of various sorts with dishes that either sound really heavy or sound really spicy.  It just seems like such a perfect pairing to me.

Fried Meatballs are (as most would expect) quite tasty.  They had really excellent flavor and a nice texture.  When I took my first bite I asked Alex if there was any cinnamon in there and then I remembered that there was some five-spice.  The perfume and flavors of the five-spice powder really comes through in the meatballs in a delicious way.  For those of you who turned your noses up at the addition of fish paste and fish sauce, it's like adding anchovies into sauces.  It doesn't make the dish taste fishy - it just gives it a really nice depth of flavor.  My one complaint about the meatballs is that I wish there had been some sort of sauce.  They weren't dry exactly, but I think that almost every meatball or meat patty could use some sort of sauce.  Alex and I briefly discussed how some sauce with a thick, aioli-type consistency would have been marvelous with these meatballs because it would have provided some moisture, flavor and textural constrast.  A really loose sauce (like a dumpling dipping sauce) would have made the meatballs soggy.  I guess sriracha would work in a pinch.  Actually, I kind of wish I had thought of that at the time.  We could have made some sort of sriracha mayo or something.  Oh well.  As for the cucumbers, they are exactly what they claim to be - simple.  I think I have made (and eaten) cucumber salads that I like more, but they were a really nice light, simple side dish for our meatballs.

Recipes after the jump!

Ma Po Tofu

Before I lived in China I was fairly certain that tofu was evil.  Well, maybe not evil but I certainly thought it was bland and far from delicious.  But once I was in China I realized that tofu can actually be really tasty.  It can also be very stinky, but that's beside the point.  Ma Po Tofu is one of my favorite tofu dishes (as well as one of my favorite Sichuan dishes).  But there are some really bad versions out there.  I have had one that I can think of in New York where the tofu was swimming in a puddle of very spicy, but otherwise flavorless oil.  And then I have had the truly phenomenal version at Little Pepper in Flushing. This version falls somewhere in the middle.  It was neither the best, nor the worst version of ma po tofu that I have ever eaten.  It was good, but it was missing the exact balance of flavors and spice that I enjoy in the best renditions of Sichuan cuisine.  Part of the problem was that our Sichuan peppercorns are getting old and have lost a lot of their pungency.  I think it's time to head out the Flushing for a fresh batch.  There wasn't as much of the slightly sour, numbing flavor of the Sichuan peppercorns as I wanted.  And Alex complained that the dish also didn't have enough chili flavor from the Sichuan chilis in the dish.  So it seems like lack of chili-flavor is our chief complaint.  It was also just a little too oily for me.  If I were to make the dish again I would definitely cut down on the amount of oil.  Other than that I just don't know...

Recipe after the jump!

Baked Eggplant "Fries"

When we were at the farmers' market looking for for some fun new ingredients last weekend I saw a few beautiful purple eggplants that I couldn't resist.  They were so pretty and purple - a beautiful glossy lavender.  I was really looking for Asian eggplant, rather than regular eggplant, but I just had to buy these guys.  And then when it came time to cook them I had no idea what to do with them.  I had a pasta recipe that called for eggplant, but we just had pasta for lunch on Sunday and then I ate the leftovers yesterday.  So we made eggplant fries.  And I found a recipe in Mario Batali's Spain: A Culinary Road Trip cookbook for Fried Eggplant.  It sounded pretty awesome.  But I didn't want to fry anything (I included the recipe anyway).  I love fried zucchini sticks, and we have had some success making baked zucchini sticks.  So we made some eggplant "fries."  For our first epic fail of the evening we whipped up a bunch of Italian-Style Breadcrumbs and then tried to coat the eggplant.  It just wasn't working.  So we looked up a recipe for baked eggplant and found one that used a Greek yogurt mixture to make the breadcrumbs stick to the eggplant.  It seemed like a great idea so we went ahead and stole it, changing the seasonings and ingredients so they better suited the flavors of our breadcrumbs.  Once we successfully breaded the eggplant fries we started trying to whip up a sauce.  Epic fail #2 of the evening - a homemade aioili.  I'm not sure exactly what went wrong, but it never emulsified and thickened.  I looked up some recipes that said you need to use room temperature egg yolks.  That was probably our first error.  Lord only knows what else we did wrong.  Epic fail #3 - I think we killed our mini-prep.  Oops.  So these eggplant fries were good.  They were interesting and a fun way to eat eggplant, but not a showstopper.  After our failure with the aioli we had to scrounge around for a sauce and we tried serving them with mayo (Alex's suggestion and it worked pretty well) and ketchup.  I think if we had the aioli it would have been really nice, but what can you do.

Recipes after the jump!

Pasta with Sun Gold Tomatoes

Prior to seeing this recipe by Mario Batali in Bon Appetit, I had never heard of a sun gold tomato and I was fairly certain that it would be close to impossible to find some.  I was determined to find sun golds so I could try this recipe because I love Batali, but I figured it would take me all summer to do so.  And then on Friday when I was walking around the farmers' market at Rockefeller Center there they were.  I couldn't believe it!  Suddenly I see them everywhere.  And not only do I see the tomatoes everywhere, I see recipes for them everywhere - pasta with sun gold tomatoes, sun gold tomato gazpacho, sun gold tomato salsa...  I can't wait to try more of them now that I know how amazing those little yellow/orange cherry tomatoes really are.  They are really sweet and just gorgeous.  I love how great the tomatoes are in mid to late summer.  The next time I run to the farmers' market I'm going to pick up a few more pints of sun golds so I can play with them a little more.  One pint is going to be set aside so I can make this recipe again.  Because this pasta is just as gorgeous as the little tomatoes themselves.  The best thing about many of Mario Batali's pasta recipes are so simple, and yet so delicious.  His Spaghetti with Garlic and Oil is the perfect example.  You don't need a ton of ingredients because the ingredients play off each other so harmoniously.  His pastas are far more than the sum of their parts.  In this pasta dish you have the ideal amount of sauce and toppings to coat the pasta while ensuring that the pasta itself can shine.  In each bite you can taste the sweet acidity of the tomatoes, the sweet basil, the heat of the crushed red pepper flakes and the salty Pecorino Romano cheese.  It's a perfect summery dish that really shows off the tomatoes, the basil and the pasta, all at the same time and all in perfect balance.
 

Recipe after the jump!

Pan-Grilled Beer-Marinated Hanger Steak

First things first.  Alex tells me I have to apologize for how ugly this picture is.  Sorry guys.  Not every picture (or dish) comes out as well as I wish it would.  A pile of steak on a plate never looks very appetizing without a fabulous side dish, but the Grilled Peach Panzanella Salad we prepared with this one didn't fit on the plate.  And if we tried to serve them on the same plate, the salad ended up looking all gorgeous while the steak looked like an afterthought.  Oh well.  I guess that was kind of indicative of how I felt about the two dishes.  The peach salad was a wonderfully composed and flavorful dish, while the steak just came off a little flat in comparison.  Don't get me wrong, the steak is not bad at all (and I admit that I am probably being overly picky).  But it just couldn't compare.  Furthermore, I am of the opinion that with steaks you should really taste the beef (otherwise why bother eating steak) and in this recipe I felt like the marinade masked, rather than complimented, the inherent rich beefiness of the hanger steak.  There was a little too much going on with the marinade for it to really appeal to the carnivore in me, but not quite enough going on for it to really excite me.  Like I said, I'm being a little too picky here, but so be it. 

Recipe after the jump!