A few weeks ago Alex and I were at an impasse. We have been too busy to cook and when we do cook, we cook the same things over and over again because they are easy. But I picked up some little gem lettuce and we had a huge basil plant from the farmers' market and I wanted to do something fun with them. So we made this salad. My original plan was to pick up a rotisserie chicken from Citarella and throw it on top, but they were sold out by the time I made it to the store. So we ended up making this salad along with an heirloom tomato and fresh mozzerella salad with even more of the fresh basil. As far as this salad went, I wished the dressing had a little more umph to it. It was good. I liked it. And I always like homemade croutons. But I wanted a little more rich, nutty flavor from the anchovy and more basil flavor. Also, in the future I will probably stem and hand tear my little gem lettuce. We left the cute little heads of lettuce mostly whole here, which meant that the dressing didn't really penetrate into the heart of each head of little gem. The next time I get my hands on little gem lettuce there is a Nancy Silverton recipe I want to try in her Mozza cookbook. But lord only knows when I will find more little gem lettuce at Fairway as well as the free time to cook, so it could be some time before we get around to it...
Recipe after the jump!
I went a wee bit crazy with the grocery shopping last week and we have been working all week to try and use up all of the produce and proteins in the fridge. Somehow we ended up with a ton of tofu in the fridge - smoked tofu, spiced pressed tofu, tofu skin noodles, sprouted tofu, fried tofu... I have used some of the smoked tofu for a tofu and celery salad (which I will post later), but we had yet to use the rest of the tofu. I originally planned to make lettuce wraps with the remaining smoked tofu, but I started thinking about larb and that led me to a number of different recipes for tofu larb using firm or extra firm tofu, including this one from The Mistress of Spices. I figured extra firm sprouted tofu would work for Thai larb. Once I realized we had everything we needed for the recipe, we were on.
When I was thinking through what we should add to the larb, I knew I wanted some texture for the dish and some additional flavor, so I added thinly sliced cucumber (you want it to be thin enough to be tender, but thick enough to retain some crispness) and fried shallots. Tofu tends to be a little mushier and less toothsome than ground meat and the fried shallots and cucumbers provided a really nice textural contrast to the softness of the tofu crumbles. I briefly considered adding peanuts in lieu of the fried shallots, but I'm glad we went with the fried shallots instead because I thought the flavor of the fried shallots really added nice depth and savory flavor to the dish. You could use a variety of different lettuces or cabbages as the wrapper, but we went with Bibb lettuce because we had it in the fridge. I bought it to use as part of a (Belated) Chinese New Year meal because lettuce is a traditional component of Chinese New Year cuisine, but I never came up with a recipe I was excited about. So I ended up repurposing the lettuce for this larb. The larb managed to be both light and flavorful. And I didn't miss the meat at all. Sometimes when I eat tofu I wish I was eating meat instead, but there wasn't a single instant this evening that I wished I had made a chicken or pork larb, rather than a tofu larb. All of the ingredients added something to the dish - depth of flavor, contrasting texture, a degree of freshness... It was light and it was delicious. Sometimes I heart tofu.
P.S. I know I keep using the word "light" to describe this dish, but I cannot think of a single adjective that would be more (or equally) appropriate.
Recipe after the jump!
Every time we use our Andrea Reusing cookbook I am reminded of how much I enjoyed her restaurant Lantern
in Chapel Hill. It is a phenomenal place. Her cookbook features a
different type of cuisine than the restaurant did (the restaurant was
Asian-inspired, whereas the cookbook is very seasonal and American), but
it really is lovely. We should use the cookbook more than we do
because it really is great for seasonal meals made of ingredients we
picked up from the farmers' market. The recipes are not overly
complicated and the ingredients are often relatively easy to find. The
next few recipes I have bookmarked to try are her Spinach with Melted
Leeks and Cardamom, her Roasted Spareribs with Crushed Fennel and Red Chiles and her Sauteed Savoy Cabbage with Speck and Lemon.
The savoy cabbage might actually happen later this week since we just so
happen to have both savoy cabbage and speck in the refrigerator right
now.
This particular salad recipe has been on my list of recipes to try for some time now - one of the first that I bookmarked and decided that I wanted to try when I bought the cookbook. Some salads fall into the category of being both incredibly seasonal and delicious. This salad falls among them. Roast mushrooms scream fall to me - warm, savory, nutty and richly flavorful. Sherry vinegar, shallots, garlic and parsley are all natural pairing for mushrooms but combining the mushrooms with frisee, lemon juice and chives was new to me. The dressing lightened and brightened up the umami flavor of the mushrooms, while the frisee gave it a hint of bitterness that was balanced out by the sweetness of the roasted shallots. And the garlicky croutons gave the salad both texture and flavor. I loved the roughly torn look and the crunch of the croutons. The original recipe called for 1 1/2 pounds of mushrooms, but I drew the limit at spending $30 at the farmers' market on wild mushrooms. And I kept the amount of the other ingredients the same so that it was more of a salad with roasted mushrooms, rather than a side of roast mushrooms tossed with a little frisee. After eating this dish (and walking home from the grocery store in the cool rain) I have to say that fall is officially here.
Recipe after the jump!
This recipe is one that I found a few weeks ago when looking for new tofu recipes. It sounded a little weird, but intriguing. I have never used lettuce in a stir-fry before. And we don't use a ton of red bell peppers in our cooking because I often don't think they add much of anything to a dish. But this dish was the exception - I thought the red pepper peppers were totally crucial here. They add a nice sweetness and a crunch that would otherwise be lacking. I really liked them. As for the lettuce, Alex said that he would have preferred cabbage to lettuce in the stir-fry, but I liked the lettuce. Napa cabbage would have been a little sweeter, but similarly crunchy. So I guess it's a matter of preference. I really liked this dish. I think I liked it more than Alex did, but I generally like tofu dishes more than Alex (at least I think I do, although he might like ma po tofu more than I do). But I thought this dish was light and healthy, but very flavorful. Given the small amount of jalapeno in there I didn't know if you would get any heat, but the heat was definitely there. I wouldn't call it a spicy dish, but you could taste the heat of the chili in every bite. You could also taste the garlic and the ginger in every bite. I really liked it. And I felt very... virtuous and healthy eating it, which was a plus.
Recipe after the jump!
Sometimes I am completely oblivious. Take this salad for instance, a Romaine Salad with Anchovy Dressing and Parmesan. Sounds simple enough. And tasty. But as soon as I tasted the dressing I realized that it was essentially homemade caesar dressing - only a little more acidic and a lot less creamy than your standard caesar dressing. I must have been absolutely spaced out not to realize that romaine, plus anchovies, garlic, evoo and Parm-Reg equals caesar salad. There I was thinking about how the salad would be the perfect side to a Mediterranean/Greek shrimp dish and I completely missed it. Oops. So once I started thinking about it in the context of caesar salad, I couldn't help missing croutons. Aren't the croutons always the best part of a caesar salad anyway? Even if this were to be thought of as just a salad and not a caesar salad, I would think it was missing something. It just needed another element, another texture really, to bring it all together. If I were to focus on the salad as a caesar salad, I would have to say that I preferred the Bayona Caesar that we made awhile back with arugula and homemade croutons. That dressing was a bit more complicated and had both Dijon mustard and an egg yolk to make it creamy/thick, a more luxurious-seeming dressing that I greatly appreciate with a caesar salad. If I were to try to shift my mindset to think of the salad as just another salad and not a caesar salad (which, to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that I could) I think I would still prefer another salad. It's not that the salad was bad. It wasn't. It's just that it didn't really stand out for me and I think we have made better.
Recipe after the jump!
Once again, this meal was dictacted by the random assortment of ingredients in our fridge/cupboard. I originally bought the butter lettuce for a Jicama, Radish and Pepita Salad, but then our jicama went bad. So I was stuck with a thing of really nice butter lettuce from Whole Foods that I needed to use. We had defrosted the ground pork to make our Spicy Long Beans with Sausage and Mushrooms, which required only 2 oz of ground pork when we had to defrost roughly 3/4 of a pound. So we had about 1/2 a pound of ground pork to use in addition to the lettuce. I was originally going to make some sort of Vietnamese pork meatballs for our lettuce wraps, but I got lazy and decided to just saute the ground pork instead. I added some water chestnuts because I noticed that we had several cans when cleaning out the pantry the other day and wanted to use one up. Plus I love the crunch that the water chestnuts imparts. The carrots, cucumbers and cilantro are typical banh mi toppings that I decided to throw on for garnish and added freshness (although I decided not to pickle them), whereas the cashews were there for some more texture and salt. I'm a big believer that almost every Southeast Asian dish is better off with a healthy squeeze of lime juice and a dollop of sriracha so we served those with the dish as well.
This dish really needs a healthy squeeze of lime juice to make it all come together and pop. When you get that lime flavor it really comes to life. Without the lime it is a little boring, but with the lime you can really taste the slightly sweet, floral qualities of the five-spice and the sweetness of the brown sugar. Add a little dollop of sriracha and you have the heat and acidity of the sriracha, the sweetness of the sugar, the warmth of the five-spice and the sweet tartness of the limes. Yum. I seriously considered squeezing two tablespoons of lime juice or so over the entire bowl of pork filling before serving, but I think that in the end being able to customize your wrap is one of the best parts so I served the lime wedges on the side. Just don't be stingy on the limes or you might be a little disappointed in the filling. Also, don't buy unsalted cashews on accident like I did because that's just a total bummer when you bite in expecting that salty crunch and instead you just get crunch. It's very sad.
Recipe after the jump!
