Spanish Roast Chicken with Romesco and Grilled Onions

I'm not sure how or why I ended up deciding that roast chicken or roast duck would be the perfect meal for New Years Eve, but I got it in my head that I wanted to roast a whole bird of some sort and I went to Fairway to buy both.  And then I looked at the recipes I wanted to make and decided that we would make the chicken for New Years Eve and make the duck on January 1.  We had to re-evaluate the duck and push it back until the weekend because the bourbon-pickled jalapenos need to pickle for 3 days so I'll report back sometime this weekend on how the duck worked out.  I'm pretty excited.  

Anyway, it has been a long time since we last roasted a whole chicken.  For the most part we roast bone-in chicken breasts because it is far less time and labor-intensive than roasting a whole chicken.  It also seems a little wasteful to roast a whole chicken when I'm really only interested in the breasts.  But every once in awhile we give it a shot.  And this recipe has me totally inspired to go out and roast more whole chickens.  It was delicious - the smoked paprika rub gave the chicken a really wonderful smoky, earthy flavor.  We were both a little worried when we pulled the chicken from the oven that it would be totally overdone (just look at how brown the skin is) but it wasn't at all.  The chicken was moist and juicy.  And when you ate it with the romesco (which was wonderfully smoky, bright and acidic and ever so slightly spicy) it was delicious.  I also loved the grilled scallions on the side.  We had some king oyster mushrooms in the fridge that I wanted to use so we threw them on the grill too while we were grilling up the scallions.  They kind of look like sunchokes in the picture, but they were mushrooms.  I can't wait to bust this recipe out at some future date.  There is more than enough romesco for 2 whole chickens.  I think if I were to have 4-6 people over I would cook two chickens, double the number of scallions, grill up some more mushrooms and serve it all with a salad and some nice bread.  Done.  Maybe I would start off the meal with some cheese and some Marcona almonds, but it would be a totally wonderful and relatively simple meal.  Now that I am back into the whole roast chicken game, there is an Ina Garten roast chicken recipe that I have been meaning to try for awhile that might just be my next attempt...

Recipe after the jump!

Spicy Soba Noodles with Smoked Tofu, Shiitakes and Cabbage

I'm not sure when I first stumbled across this recipe (or why), but it has been sitting in my draft post folder for some time.  My best guess is that I was looking for recipes using soba noodles and decided to bookmark this one for future use.  Who knows?  But I'm a sucker for shiitake mushrooms, edamame and soba noodles, so it totally makes sense that this recipe sounded good to me.  I decided to use more edamame than the recipe called for (it originally wanted a cup of edamame, but I figured why not use the entire 12 oz bag of frozen edamame) and to add some smoked tofu.  I figured that the tofu would add some smoky flavor, and both ingredients would up the amount of protein in the dish to make the dish more filling.  I also cut back on the amount of noodles in the original recipe after reading through some of the reviews posted on Epicurious.  I love soba noodles, but why not make the healthy choice and go a little heavier on the veggies and a little lighter on the carbs?

When I was explaining the recipe to Alex, he called it "Korean vegetable spaghetti."  And he kept referring to it as "Korean spaghetti" all evening.  Spaghetti wasn't the first thing that came to mind for me when I saw or tasted the dish, but to each their own.  I see what he was saying.  It's a noodle dish with lots of veggies - in theory it's like a pasta primavera, only not so much.  First of all, I have never had a spicy pasta primavera before.  Second, none of these ingredients (except for the garlic) would go anywhere near a pasta primavera recipe.  Some of the reviews complained that the sauce here was bland, but I totally disagree.  I know we went light on the noodles (and noodles typically soak up and therefore require a lot more sauce than veggies) and added smoked tofu (which is pretty flavorful on its own), but I actually liked how the addition of the soba noodles mellowed the sauce a little and offset the spicyness of the gochujang.  I was worried that the recipe didn't call for the addition of any salt prior to the addition of the sauce (with the exception of the salt in the boiling water for the noodles and edamame), but after adding the sauce I'm glad we didn't salt it initially.  If we had salted the vegetables I think the dish would have been too salty overall.  If I were to make the dish again I would probably keep the ratio of sauce to noodles the same, but I could vary the vegetables according to what I happened to have on hand.  I think you could play with those proportions to your heart's content without detracting from the dish at all.

Recipe after the jump!

(Belated) Chinese New Year Meal #4: Stir-Fried Oyster Mushrooms with Chicken (Ping Gu Ji Pian) and Blanched Choy Sum with Sizzling Oil (You Lin Cai Xin)

I wasn't going to include this dish as one of our (Belated) Chinese New Year meals because we have already included a chicken dish and I had another that I was considering making, but I loved this recipe so much that I couldn't resist.  The flavors were different from everything we have featured thus far - relatively fresh, simple and subtle.  Rather than being hit over the head with spice, fermented black beans or Sichuan peppercorns, this dish features the more subtle flavors of oyster mushrooms, ginger and garlic.  It was just so lovely and so very satisfying.  I wanted to keep eating and eating and eating.  This is a dish that I can imagine serving my kids (first I have to get around to having kids, but you know what I mean).  We served the chicken with some blanched greens that were equally homey and delicious. Pouring sizzling oil over a pile of aromatics on top of the lightly blanched greens and then drizzling a mixture of soy sauce and water over the whole kit and caboodle imparts a lot more flavor to the greens than you would think.  Alex mentioned that he was totally surprised by how flavorful the greens were.  Again, the flavors are subtle (rather than in your face), but each bite of choy sum is nicely seasoned and flavored.  And for once, Alex didn't complain or comment that he wished dinner was spicier.  

Recipes after the jump!

Noodles with Tofu, Broccoli and Mushrooms

I love highly flavored, exotic dishes but sometimes I need "boring" food.  When planning tonight's dinner all I could think of was broccoli and tofu.  A large part of that was provably due to the fact that we didn't have much in the fridge other than broccoli and tofu, but that's beside the point.  This isn't the first time that I have had a broccoli and tofu craving.  Back in January I demanded a broccoli-tofu stir-fry in homemade black bean sauce over brown rice.  The recipe never made it onto the blog because (1) the dish sounded far too healthy to be good (although I thought it was quite good) and (2) it was one of those dishes where I just kept throwing a little bit of this, a little bit of that into the wok until it tasted good.  So I had no real idea what quantities of each ingredient I had used or any way to backtrack and figure it out.  Oops.  Oh well.  But it seems that broccoli and tofu have become my go-to healthy food craving in 2013.  We will see how long it lasts, but I'm thinking right now that it is going to last until spring rolls around and I start craving asparagus and salad.  I didn't feel 100% virtuous while eating these noodles, but I felt a lot more virtuous than I would have if we had made dan dan mian or another spicy, meaty noodle dish.  I briefly considered abandoning my noodle idea and making something else with the broccoli and tofu, but since we had fresh Chinese noodles in the fridge I decided to stick with it.  Once again we threw a little bit of this, a little bit of that into the wok but I tried to keep up with it this time.  And if we're being 100% honest, I was too hungry and lazy to fuss around trying to make dinner perfect so I didn't really even taste it before we plated it to see if it needed more seasoning.  The dish could have used a little something more to make it pop, but such is life.

Recipe after the jump!

Hot and Sour Soup (Suan La Tang)

This soup doesn't look like much - in fact, it kind of looks like gruel (or something equally gross).  But it was actually one of my favorite soups we have made all year.  It had a ton of flavor and a wonderful rich texture.  I'm not really sure how to describe the texture, except to describe it as slightly unctuous.  I know that unctuous can be an unappealing adjective to describe food, but I can't think of a better way to describe the soup.  And hot and sour soup is supposed to be a little unctuous.  The cornstarch slurry did its job in thickening the soup a little, but I think a lot of the texture also had to do with the richness of the homemade broth we used from our Chicken Pho (Pho Ga).  When we took the broth out of the fridge to use it, it already had some body to it.  Actually, it almost appeared to be verging on gelatinous in its chilled form.  It actually jiggled.  And even once we heated the broth up, it retained a lot of that richness, as well as the complexity of flavor that I babbled on about in my post about the pho.  And after we added in all of the additional ingredients, the soup was beautifully complex, yet balanced.  The dried mushrooms added a touch of earthiness and umami, the vinegar added the sourness and bite that you want in a hot and sour soup, the white pepper added a hint of heat, the eggs added creamyness to the already rich broth and the scallions/cilantro on top added a little brightness.  It was awesome.  I heart this soup. 

Recipe after the jump!

Warm Mushroom Salad with Shallots and Sherry Vinegar

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!

Thai Soup with Shrimp, Cabbage and Mushrooms

I am embarassed to say that I have been sitting on this post for a couple of weeks - long enough for me to forget the finer points I might have made.  Oops.  But I wrote down a few notes right after we made the soup from Alex, who thought the soup was "pretty good," "wasn't that hard to make" and "had pretty good balance of flavors."  So there you have it.  I agree with Alex that the soup was "pretty good," although I thought the broth itself needed something to give it a little more depth of flavor.  It tasted a little thin for me.  I'm not sure that thin is the right word (although it does describe the consistency), but I just wanted the broth to be a little richer and more flavorful.  The night we made this recipe I really wanted to make this Thai Shrimp and Coconut Soup with Lemongrass by Harold Dieterle, but it required yet another trip to the grocery store for lemongrass, tamarind concentrate (I think I threw the rest of ours out) and Thai chilis.  And I just got too lazy, so we used Thai curry paste and some dried lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves to spice up the broth.  It did give it some heat and flavor, but I just wanted it to be bigger/better.  Next time, I will plan more in advance and go buy the fresh lemongrass, etc. and make the Harold Dieterle soup because it really does sound fantastic. 

Recipe after the jump!

Chicken Lo Mein

I will be the first to admit that lo mein generally isn't my thing.  I could never understand growing up why so many of my friends would order shrimp lo mein (or fried rice for that matter) when we would go to a Chinese restaurant.  A large percentage of the time lo mein verges on being greasy/oily, as well as not very flavorful.  If I had to choose between lo mein and fried rice, I would order fried rice 9 times out of 10.  Strangely enough, when it comes to Thai restaurants I order noodles with impunity and I think that I would order noodles 8 times out of 10 if I had to choose between noodles and fried rice.  Random but true.  But we had all of the ingredients for lo mein, so I had to go ahead and make it (even though I was a little skeptical).  And yet, there was something comforting and wonderful about this dish.  It just felt so homey.  I really liked the profusion of vegetables in this dish - shiitake mushrooms, bell pepper, bean sprouts and scallions.  It just made it all look so pretty and gave the dish a nice variety of flavors and textures.  I also thought the flavors of the chicken and the noodles were really nice.  I would definitely marinate the chicken this way again because it really does make a huge difference.  The noodles almost tasted a bit peanutty - the first bite reminded me of the peanut noodles we have made in the past, which is interesting because there was no peanut in here to speak of and very little sesame oil.  As with most stir-fries, the time commitment here is really on the front end - chopping and prepping all of the individual ingredients.  Once you have everything prepped and ready to go the dish comes together fairly quickly and easily.

Recipe after the jump!

Salmon Bulgogi with Bok Choy and Mushrooms

Now that work has calmed down a bit, we have time to cook again.  I'm hoping that this entire month is on the slower side so Alex and I can cook and eat a bunch of meals at home, but we will have to wait and see what happens.  It has been so long since I had the time to really sit down and plan my meals that I find that I am a little rusty.  When I was trying to figure out what to make for dinner this week I literally had no inspiration whatsoever.  I couldn't think of a single thing I wanted to make, so I just dug through the freezer until I found a few proteins, picked up a few veggies at the farmers' market and then searched Epicurious to come up with some recipes.  This salmon dish was what resulted.  I do have an idea for some Chinese-inspired lamb burgers for this weekend, but we haven't made them yet so I can't take any credit.

When Alex took his first bite of the salmon he predicted I would have two thoughts - that the marinade was kind of salty and kind of harsh.  My first thought was actually that the marinade was almost ridiculously gingery.  We kind of eyeballed the proportions here so the abundance of ginger could be Alex's fault (he did the solids) and the saltiness could be my fault (I "measured" the liquids).  My second thought was that the bok choy and shiitake mushrooms were underseasoned.  But I found that when you tossed the veggies in the reduced marinade that the dish worked out pretty well.  The veggies on their own were kind of bland and the salmon with the reduced marinade/glaze on top was too highly seasoned.  When you put them together (and scraped some marinade off the salmon) it balanced out.  I was a little worried about cooking the salmon at such high temperatures, but that worked out pretty well too.  The salmon turned out to be very nicely cooked - still a touch pink in the center (which I like) and not dry like I had feared.  This will never be my favorite way to cook salmon, but with a few tweaks I think it could be a very pleasant weeknight meal since it is very simple to put together and doesn't require a ton of time, effort and/or ingredients.

Recipe after the jump!

Asparagus and Shiitake Mushroom Stir-Fry

By the end of May you guys might get a little sick of my asparagus obsession.  I just can't help myself.  And I have another 4-5 recipes that I intend to make before the spring is over.  So I am going to apologize in advance because I'm going to be on an asparagus kick for at least a little while longer.  But I promise to start mixing in a few other veggies once they become available at the farmers' market.  I have been waiting anxiously for sugar snap peas, which one of the vendors assured me would be ready this weekend.  Yay!  But the first few recipes I make will probably include both asparagus and sugar snap peas.  I just can't help myself.  But I promise that I will at least try to mix it up a little in terms of the types of asparagus recipes we make - both in terms of types of cuisine and entrees vs sides vs salads.

Anyway, if you are looking for a nice easy vegetarian stir-fry dish and you enjoy asparagus even half as much as I do, you totally want to make this dish.  Fresh in-season asparagus has a great sweet, slightly grassy flavor that pairs well with the meaty, earthy dried shiitakes.  And the sauce is sweet and savory, and with the asparagus and mushrooms it made for a very interesting combination of flavors.  Because of the meaty flavor of the mushrooms the dish is very satisfying and hearty.  I didn't miss meat at all in this stir-fry.  Served with some white rice it was a wonderful meal.

Recipe after the jump!

Fluffy Baked Eggs with Roasted-Vegetable Hash

When I was initially conceptualizing this dish I was thinking about making sweet potato hash with runny egg yolks.  But then I started playing around online and came up with this dish.  It wasn't exactly what I was planning on, but it seemed interesting enough to alter my tentative meal plans.  So we hit the farmers' market to stock up on eggs and mushrooms to go with the sweet potatoes we already had in the pantry.  I'm not sure exactly what inspired me to buy sweet potatoes, but I decided some time ago to pick up a few in an attempt to mix things up a bit more.  I was planning on making a Vietnamese curry with sweet potatoes, but somehow that never came to be.  And then I thought about making roasted sweet potato fries, but that never came to be either.  So today for lunch we finally used our sweet potatoes to make this dish.  And it was lovely - very autumnal, but not heavy and greasy.  The eggs were fluffy and light.  And delightfully cheesy, but not overwhelmingly so.  Alex was actually amazed by how much the eggs rose/puffed up during the baking process.  They almost reminded me of a souffle, but not quite as airy and far less labor-intensive to prepare.  It's not a dish that I will be dreaming about for years to come, but I was very pleased with it.

Recipe after the jump!

Quinoa with Spinach, Goat Cheese, and Sauteed Shiitakes

I don't know about you but sometimes I crave veggies with a vengeance.  And after a weekend of stuffing my face, all I wanted was something between a salad and a pile of cooked veggies.  This dish fit the bill nicely (and coincidentally was one of the first few recipes that really drew my eye in my new Jean-Georges cookbook).  Quinoa is a lovely healthy grain that Alex and I don't make nearly enough of.  I also feel the same way about shiitake mushrooms (although it's obviously not a grain).  So this dish combined two of my favorite underutilized ingredients in a wonderful way.  I was afraid the dish might be a bit bland, but it was surprisingly tasty.  I really should have known better than to doubt Jean-Georges Vongerichten!  No one component of the dish really stood out for me, but I really enjoyed the combination of woodsy, meaty shiitakes, creamy goat cheese and nutty quinoa. Our goat cheese tasted faintly lemony to me, which I thought was nice.  The flavors are somewhat subtle (with the exception of the sauteed shiitakes which have a really deep and rich flavor to them), but they work together beatuifully.  Toasting the quinoa to make it a little nuttier and give it a little more texture was a great touch.  Hurray for a healthy vegetarian meal!  Over the next few weeks I am definitely planning on a few more healthy vegetarian meals until I atone for all of my recent gluttony.  Vegetables and whole grains, here I come.

Recipe after the jump!

Mesclun Salad with Warm Mushroom Vinaigrette

Like the Dinosaur Kale and Feta Panini, this salad was partially inspired by a dish I saw at inotecca over the weekend.  The funny thing about that is that prior to last weekend Alex and I had never eaten at inotecca before.  And while I enjoyed the meal, it wasn't impressive enough that I thought while dining that I would be drawing so much inspiration from the restaurant.  Even funnier is that I didn't order either of the two items that inspired this salad and the panini.  The table next to us did order the salad and from what I remember from the menu and/or could tell from staring at them, it was a mixed green salad of sorts with roasted mushrooms on top.  I don't think there was any cheese, but I couldn't say for certain.  We had a few cups of the mesclun from the farmers' market left (as well as some cremini mushrooms) and I wanted to make a fun, earthy salad, so adding mushrooms seemed like an interesting idea.  I pan roasted the mushrooms with evoo, garlic, shallots and rosemary and then added a splash of sherry vinegar (plus some more evoo at the end) so that the mushrooms were both a topping and the dressing for the salad.  They were pretty tasty.  Then I shaved on some really nice Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.  The one thing that I didn't do and I wish that I had done is to make some homemade croutons.  I think that the buttery flavor and the crunchy texture of the croutons really would have taken this salad to the next level.  As if was, the mushrooms were really lovely and the flavors were good, but it felt like it was lacking a little something.  Lesson learned - next time I will make croutons!

Recipe after the jump!

Roasted Wild Mushrooms with Miso Butter

We originally whipped up this miso butter so we could make the Pan-Roasted Asparagus, Poached Egg & Miso Butter from the Momofuku cookbook.  Then we realized our asparagus wasn't good.  Ugh.  I really hate it when that happens.  So I dug through the fridge for an alternative and came across some wild mushrooms - oyster mushrooms, enoki mushrooms and shiitakes.  I decided to go ahead and roast the mushrooms and serve them on a pool/bed of the miso butter.  I thought that the flavor of the miso butter went really well with the mushrooms.  Roasted mushrooms are a bit nutty and so is the miso butter.  The richness of the miso butter could get a little overwhelming, but the sherry that you cut the miso butter with gives it a nice punch and cut through the hearty flavors of the miso butter and the mushrooms wonderfully.  Given how well this turned out on the fly, I wonder what else the miso butter works with?

Recipe after the jump!

Spicy Long Beans with Sausage and Mushrooms

One of the thing I love most about Asian grocery stores is the rather random assortment of fun ingredients like long beans.  I always think about buying them, but I never do because I end up buying pea shoots, yu choy or gai lan.  About a month ago I finally pulled the trigger and bought some.  Then I got busy at work and forgot all about them.  They turned up in the bottom of the crisper about a week or two later, moldy and gross.  Fail.  But I decided this past weekend to try again so I picked up another bunch.  And we finally made long beans!  One of the things that immediately drew me to this recipe (aside form the long beans of course) was the fact that everything in the recipe is a staple that we keep in the pantry or refrigerator.  We didn't have to go out to buy anything.  Go us.  However, this recipe used up the rest of our sesame oil so before we can make it again we need to stock back up.  Here's hoping that I remember to pick up some more sesame oil on my next trip to the grocery...

I am pretty impressed with our first attempt at long beans.  They were really tasty and interesting.  Every time we make a dish with dried shiitake mushrooms I am reminded of just how much I like them as an ingredient.  We made Stir-Fried Rice with Pork and Shiitake Mushrooms back in February that was absolutely delicious, which I totally attribute to the earthy, funky flavor of the mushrooms.  The same held true here - I loved the flavor of the mushrooms.  The preserved vegetables added some funk of their own to the dish too, but in a slightly different way.  The mushrooms are more deeply umami whereas the preserved vegetables are pungently salty and garlicky.  I also thought that the ground pork and Chinese sausage together were a really nice combination.  The Chinese sausage is rich and porky, but sweet and has a nice crisp texture to it, while the ground pork is meaty and homey.  I thought this was the type of dish (with slightly different proportions to be heavier on the green beans and lighter on the meat) that I could totally have seen myself eating in a back alley restaurant in China with plastic stools and little tables set up outside on the sidewalk.  It was totally satisfying and not at all pretentious.  Two thumbs up.  I told Alex that this is my favorite recipe we have made from this particular cookbook yet.  The Five-Spice Chicken with Sugar Snaps was pretty good, but as far as I am concerned this dish was better.

Recipe after the jump!

Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

So along with the 5 pounds of berries I brought home from Maryland, I also brought home four gigantic portobello mushrooms.  My mom is a big believer in Cost Co. because everything there is super-sized and a good value, and these mushrooms were no exception.  I'm not sure that I have ever seen portobellos this huge before!  But seeing as we had the mushrooms and had nothing defrosted or planned for dinner last night, I decided to make stuffed mushrooms.  Growing up I loved the stuffed mushrooms at an Italian restaurant near my parents' house in Maryland, they had meat, cheese and bread crumbs in them and were totally delicious.  For last night's version I decided to go vegetarian (for once we actually did a Meatless Monday - go us).  We tossed in fresh herbs, cheese, spinach and some of our homemade Italian-Style Bread Crumbs.  Then we just threw it in the oven until cooked and broiled it for a minute to toast up the bread crumbs on top.  It was as simple as that.  And the mushrooms were delicious.  They were hearty and savory.  I didn't miss meat in the filling at all.  In fact, I think they were even better without meat in them.  I'm not sure that I tasted the individual components of the filling in every single bite (particularly the spinach, although you could taste the garlic and the red pepper flakes) but they all came together really nicely.  Alex and I both agreed that we would definitely make the mushrooms again.  If you served one mushroom per person they would make a nice appetizer and two per person is more than enough for an entree.

Recipe after the jump!

Roasted Wild Mushrooms with Rosemary and Garlic Oil

Mushrooms don't show up in our apartment a lot.  We go months without cooking mushrooms and when we do cook them, they're usually just one component in a dish - part of a stir-fry or one of several toppings on a pizza.  Although I really enjoy mushrooms, I almost never cook up a side of just mushrooms.  I don't know why that is.  I guess we all have our go-to dishes or ingredients.  Mushrooms just don't happen to be one of mine.  And every time I cook them I wonder why I don't make them more often.  Because roasted mushrooms are good - meaty, hearty and flavorful.  If you toss them with a homemade garlic oil they are just that much better.  I know they aren't pretty, nor are they earth-shattering, but they are yummy and very easy to make.

Recipe after the jump!

Roast Purple Fingerling Potatoes with King Oyster Mushrooms

The other day at the Greenmarket I came across some beautiful purple Peruvian fingerling potatoes.  These things were the craziest, most gorgeous purple inside and out.  So I bought a pound.  And then I brought them home and realized I didn't know what to do with my little potatoes.  We don't eat a ton of potatoes in our apartment because I am just not that into them.  Alex, being the good little Polish-Irish boy that he is, loves potatoes.  I'm fairly indifferent.  But when we were on vacation with my family, my mother made us Jalapeno-Roasted Potatoes for dinner one night and they were actually pretty good.  So when I saw the pretty purple potatoes at the Greenmarket I decided that I should give fingerling potatoes another try. 

I have to admit that I still just don't get the roast potato - fingerling or otherwise.  Potatoes (without a ton of salt and other seasonings) are just so heavy and bland.  We tossed these potatoes in shallots, garlic, rosemary, evoo and s&p.  And then we roasted them to get them nice and crispy.  I accidentally set the temperature on the oven to 475 instead of 450 so we roasted the potatoes a little too long and they were a little dry.  They were dry enough that we topped them with some fresh ricotta cheese from Eataly to give the dish some moisture.  I had originally planned to top the potatoes with some poached or fried eggs (kind of like a hash), so that the egg yolk could ooze down over the potatoes and form a sort of sauce.  But in the end I decided against the eggs - mostly because I got lazy.  And in the end I think the eggs would just have made the dish feel heavier.  If we had cooked the potatoes correctly it would have been a much better dish.  However, I still think it would have been a bit bland.  I think that if you roasted the potato mixture alongside a whole chicken the drippings from the chicken would give the potatoes and mushrooms some much needed moisture and flavor.  Without what Alex and I like to call the "chicken juju" the potatoes were just missing something.  But they remained a very pretty purple color, so at least they were nice to look at?

Recipe (and a picture of the potatoes right after we cleaned them and halved them) after the jump!

Turkey Sausage, Red Onion, and Shiitake Mushroom Pizza

Meal number one in the new, non-Asian leaf we have turned over - pizza.  And a great pizza at that.  Restaurant-quality pizza.  For which I give a lot of the credit to the sausage and the dough.  The turkey sausage came from DiPaolo Turkey Farm at the Greenmarket and I think it is better than most pork Italian sausages.  Their turkey sausage is just so incredibly flavorful and somehow is less dry than other turkey sausages.  It has a ton of fennel seed and other spices to really make it special.  If the sausage hadn't been so flavorful the pizza wouldn't have been nearly as good.  The same goes for the dough (which I picked up from Eataly) - because the cooked pizza crust had the perfect taste and texture.  I guess some of the credit there goes to the pizza stone too.  That pizza stone is a pain in the butt and weighs a ton, but it can really make a difference to your meal.  Aside from the dough, the pizza just had a really nice flavor profile.  The onions gave the pizza some sweetness, the sausage gave it spice and a certain meatiness, and then the mushrooms made the pizza taste earthy and hearty.  I also loved the hint of fresh rosemary in every bite. 

The taste of this pizza had almost nothing to do with our skill as chefs, and everything to do with the quality of the ingredients.  I'm calling this pizza my quasimodo pizza since there was a bit of an incident when I transferred the pizza onto the pizza stone.  Generally Alex and I roll out the dough on a cutting board, then using the rolling pin we transfer the pizza to the back of a cookie sheet that has been liberally dusted with cornmeal.  The cornmeal acts like little ball bearings and turns the cookie sheet into a ghetto pizza peel.  But due to the weight of the toppings the pizza stretched out while I was trying to transfer it from the cookie sheet to the pizza stone, and so the stretched out pizza ended up flopping off the end of the stone.  I took a spatula and flipped the extra crust back on top of the pizza and called it a day.  So I may not be a perfect pizza chef, but who cares when the results are this tasty?

Recipe after the jump!

Stir-Fried Rice with Pork and Shiitake Mushrooms (Rou Si Chao Fan)

Fried rice has never enjoyed the prominence in China that it does in the United States.  While I was in China I really only saw fried rice served in the little noodle shop near my school in styrofoam containers, along with various stir-fried noodle dishes.  I don't recall ever seeing it in restaurants.  Not once!  But Alex and I like to make fried rice periodically because it's an excellent way to use up leftovers and to put together a quick and tasty meal.  It has never occurred to me before to use dried shiitake mushrooms in my fried rice, but I really liked that touch.  I think that I might incorporate those mushrooms into more of my fried rice recipes because I really liked that touch.  Dried shiitake mushrooms have a much deeper and earthier flavor than fresh shiitakes.  It's very umami.  I love egg and leeks in fried rice, so we threw those in there (even though the recipe didn't use them) as well.  I thought that the ground pork was really nice in here because it was more evenly dispersed than chunks or slices of pork would have been.  All in all, I really liked this rice and would make it again.  It's not earth-shattering, but it's flavorful and homey. 

P.S.  I have decided that my seven Asian meals for Chinese New Year is restricted to main courses and fried rice (and other sides) don't count.  So this is just a bonus!
 

Recipe after the jump!