Spinach with Melted Leeks and Cardamom

I can't figure out what it was about this recipe that made me want to cook it.  I have never been a huge fan of creamed spinach - if it is there I will certainly eat it, but I have never ordered (or made) creamed spinach in my life.  I do like sauteed spinach, either by itself or folded into pastas or omelets.  The Spinach Catalan Style is one of my favorite sauteed spinach recipes.  But spinach is everywhere right now (both in the farmers' market and the grocery store) and it seemed due time to try a new spinach recipe.  I know I mentioned that I was planning on making this dish along with a few others when we made the Warm Mushroom Salad with Shallots and Sherry Vinegar.  And I am determined to use the Andrea Reusing cookbook now with the remaining bounty at the farmers' market.  So this seemed like a match made in heaven.  The only problem was that Alex and I both found the dish to be a little muddy tasting.  When we tasted it in the pan it was tasty - perfumed nicely with the cardamom and with the creamy tang of the creme fraiche.  But by the time we plated the spinach and got it to the table (which took no more than a minute), the flavors got muddled and the spinach itself developed a somewhat slimy texture.  Perhaps we should have skipped that last minute of cooking everything together with the creme fraiche and leeks and pulled the spinach from the pan a minute earlier to prevent any overcooking.  Or perhaps we should just recognize the fact that we don't really like creamed spinach and call it a day. 

Recipe after the jump!

Egg and Spinach Kati Rolls with Cilantro Chutney

Happy Fourth of July everyone!  This dish had nothing to do with the Fourth (we didn't make it or eat it today), but I am going to post it anyway since I have the time on my hands to do so. But it's going to be a short post because...   Well because I am tired and i have work tomorrow!  Suffice it to say that this is one of my favorite meals that we have made of late.  It was totally delicious.  The kati rolls had a really nice combination of flavors and textures - buttery, flaky parathas, the sweetness of the onion and the garam masala, the slight smokiness of the cumin in the eggs and the chutney and the fresh, bright flavor and kick of the cilantro chutney...  And by the way, our cilantro chutney had some serious heat so a little went a long way.  It was just so yummy.  In case you couldn't tell, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I was surprised by how well all of the elements came together because sometimes when I conceptualize a dish in my head it never quite comes together.  But this was a total (vegetarian) winner.  Yay!

Recipe after the jump!

Penne with Spinach and Ricotta

I love fresh ricotta.  And the fresh ricotta we have in the fridge has been begging for another use.  I had various ideas about what to make with the ricotta, but I settled on a simple pasta recipe.  I thought about making gnocchi or gnudi, but then decided to go with a simpler recipe.  I also thought about making some sort of baked pasta with ricotta, but it's too warm to bake pasta right now.  In the end I picked a recipe on Food & Wine from Lidia Bastianich because it looked easy and we had everything we needed, except the spinach and the sage, in the fridge.  I was originally thinking of making up my own pasta recipe using spinach and ricotta with lemon zest, but I decided to try this recipe instead.  The recipe actually called for pappardelle, but we had penne in the cupboard.  So we went with that instead.  

This pasta isn't going to win any awards for being new and original, or unbelievably delicious.  And if all you have is grocery store ricotta I would steer clear.  But with the wonderful fresh ricotta we picked up from the farmer's market it was actually quite good!  The fresh ricotta gave it a very pleasant creaminess and richness and the Parm-Reg gave it some more robust, salty flavor.  I never would have thought to pair fresh sage with baby spinach, scallions and fresh ricotta.  When I think sage I think Thanksgiving or butternut squash.  I don't think fresh ricotta and spinach.  But it worked.  The only problem was that the ricotta didn't cling to the pasta very well so some bites were essentially plain pasta, whereas others were full of spinach and ricotta.  Oh well. 

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!

Grilled Branzino with Ladolemono and Sauteed Spinach with Garlic

I was craving a really fresh and light meal for dinner tonight.  While I was at Fairway trying to figure out dinner I was immediately drawn to the whole branzino.  So I had the fishmonger clean and scale two branzinos for me and brought them home.  My original plan was to stuff the branzino with herbs and lemon slices, and then serve drizzled with some really nice evoo and lemon juice (kind of like this Whole-Roasted Rainbow Trout we made about a year ago).  Then I remembered this recipe from my Bon Appetit and decided to make that instead.  For the record, I don't know if they have new writers at Bon Appetit or what, but they had really fantastic issues all summer long.  I haven't made any of the recipes from the September through November issues, but I really need to because we made a number of very successful meals with recipes from the June through August issues!  This branzino was yet another successful dish.  I was worried that the fish wouldn't have enough flavor, but branzino is such a mild fish that it really worked.  The ladolemono (essentially a lemon vinaigrette made with equal parts lemon juice and evoo) and dried Greek oregano gave it more than enough flavor.  It had a lot of zing and freshness from the lemon, countered by the buttery evoo and the fragrant oregano.  And then the fish was very moist and perfectly cooked.  This recipe was definitely a keeper and I can't wait to try it with an actual grill to get that extra element of flavor.  We served the branzino with a very simple sauteed spinach with garlic and lemon juice - fresh and healthy, but flavorful.

Recipes after the jump!

 

Spinach Salad with Walnuts (Salatet bil s'banegh joz)

First and foremost, isn't this salad beautiful?  I'm not sure that this picture does it justice but trust me, the colors are gorgeous in person.  The ruby red pomegranate seeds, white yogurt, and green mint just look so wonderful together.  And they actually taste pretty good together too.  But as pretty as the salad was, we both agreed that it needed something.  In certain bites where you had the proper balance of all of the ingredients it was quite good.  Then you would have another bite that would be somewhat bland and boring.  I guess that is what happens when you have a salad with this many ingredients.  It's pretty hard to make sure that each bite is perfectly balanced.  But even in the ideal bites you could still sense that the salad was just missing something.  Something with a little more bite or perhaps a little more sweetness.  Alex wanted the pomegranate seeds to be sweeter.  I thought the pomegranate seeds were sweet enough, but there was just something else it all needed to come together.  I just don't know what.

Recipe after the jump!

Dinner Spanakopitas

Every once in awhile Alex and I take out all the stops and make a crazily labor-intensive meal.  It seems that every time we decide to stuff something, be it dumplings, pan-fried buns, or spanakopita, it takes us forever.  For instance, with this recipe we took the phyllo dough out of the freezer around 2pm so that it would be defrosted in time for dinner.  According to the package instructions, the best way to defrost them phyllo is to leave the box of phyllo out on the counter at room temperature for 5 hours.  Realistically Alex and I can only do that on the weekend, unless we want to eat dinner at midnight.  On my way home from work this evening (yes I know it's a Sunday, but sometimes I have to go into work on the weekend) I swung by the grocery store to pick up the last remaining ingredient for our spanakopita.  I had already picked up everything, we ended up using the eggs this morning for breakfast so I had to go pick some of those up.  Once I got home it was about 8:30 pm and then we had to go through the whole process of making the filling (which Alex had already started on).  And then I had to figure out how to butter the phyllo dough and roll it up properly.  I'm not going to lie, it was another 10:00 pm dinner.  I imagine that working with phyllo dough gets easier the more you do it, but man that stuff is fragile.  The last time we made a meal this crazy was when we made our Panfried Pork and Scallion Mini-Buns.  Granted, those mini-buns had more active cooking time because we had to make the dough, rather than just defrost some phyllo.

While this meal was easier to make than the mini-buns, the mini-buns were worth the extra effort.  At a certain point if you are going to put forth a ton of effort you might as well put forth a little extra effort for a more successful final product.  Don't get me wrong, these spanakopita were far from bad.  In fact, they were quite good.  With a few tweaks here and there to the filling and a little practice with phyllo dough, they could be even better.  But they weren't the best spanakopita I have ever had and if you're going to go to the trouble to make them at home, you really want them to be amazing.  If I can go to Trader Joe's and buy a package of frozen spanakopita that are as good as the ones I am spending hours to make at home, that really makes you wonder why you are bothering.  With all of that said, I'm really glad that we finally bit the bullet and made this recipe because I have wanted to make it for awhile now.  I'm not sure if I will be making it again anytime in the near future (esp since there is a little Greek take out shop a few blocks from our apartment that supposedly has amazing spanakopita that we have yet to try), but I'm pretty excited to add a new dish to my repertoire.

Recipe after the jump!

Easy North Carolina-Style Half Picnic Shoulder and Spinach with Collards Seasoning

I will give you two guesses as to who picked this recipe.  I handed Alex the cookbook last week and told him to pick a recipe for us to try.  Both of the recipes he picked were for pork shoulder - Oven BBQed Picnic Shoulder and Easy North Carolina-Style Half Picnic Shoulder.  I picked the less complicated one of the two.  So I guess that means we both picked the recipe, but as with most pork recipes, Alex was the driving force behind it.  So this is our second attempt at North Carolina-style pulled pork and our third attempt at cooking a pork shoulder this year.  First we made Slow Cooker Pulled Pork (although it took us a little while to post about it).  Then we made Jalapeno-Roast Pork.  After we make this pork shoulder I might need to take a slight break from making any more pork shoulder for at least a little while.  Then again, summer is perfect pulled pork/BBQ weather, so we might have one more pork shoulder in us (perhaps the Oven BBQed Picnic Shoulder) before we call it quits.  I was going to serve this pork with some coleslaw, because I love pulled pork and coleslaw, but I decided that since we had Asian Winter Slaw for lunch yesterday, that was coleslaw overkill.  So instead I elected to make faux-collards from another Lee Bros recipe.  That sounds like a good Southern meal, right?  

This dish is crazy rich.  And I mean CRAZY rich.  I think if we had made sandwiches and served the pork with a coleslaw and a vinegar-based bbq sauce, that would have done a lot to cut the richness.  The sauce that you serve the pork with is sweet rather than sour, which doesn't do a lot to cut through the fatty pork.  I will probably serve the pork again, but I will come up with another sauce (most likely a traditional eastern North Carolina-style barbecue sauce).  So that is how we're going to eat the leftovers (more on the leftovers later).  This cooking method kept the pork very moist, which I appreciated.  Alex loved the nuggets if crispy skin that were sprinkled throughout the pork.  I thought that they tasted fine, but they got stuck in my teeth.  And that was just a tad too much fat for me.  I thought there would be more vinegar flavor to cut through the richness of the pork, considering the pork was marinated in 2 cups of white vinegar and then basted with the vinegar-based marinade for 3 hours.  And let me tell you, every time you opened up the oven to baste the pork, you got hit with a blast of vinegar.  But I really didn't taste the vinegar at all until the pork had sat on the counter for an hour or so and dried out.  Actually, the pork that we pulled and set aside for leftovers was arguably far more flavorful - both in terms of spice and vinegar level, than the pork that we initially served ourselves for dinner.  Granted, that pork was a lot drier than the pork we ate for dinner, but I thought that given the difference in flavor I would take the drier, more flavorful meat.  So I guess the lesson I learned from that is to let the meat rest longer after you pull it out of the oven (we let it sit for 10 minutes, but maybe we should have let it sit a little longer) and then pull it and let it rest a few more minutes before serving.  As for the spinach, it was very Southern and it really did remind me of collards.  Alex said that he liked the pork better than the spinach and I agree with that.  But if we are really being honest here, since when can spinach compete with pulled pork? 

Recipes after the jump!

Water Spinach with Shrimp Paste and Chilis (Kangkung Belacan)

WARNING - this vegetable dish is legitimately and strangely funky.  You have to be a fairly adventurous eater, and enjoy spicy, somewhat fishy tasting thing to like this dish.  The first time I tried this dish at Fatty Crab I didn't really like it.  It is one of two dishes that I have tried there and not been totally into.  Part of the reason I disliked it was because the water spinach felt gritty in my mouth, like it hadn't been thoroughly washed.  And that could have been the case, or it could just be that the shrimp paste they used had a grittier consistency to it.  I honestly don't know.  But when I saw the recipe for kangkung belacan in The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook, I figured I had to give it another shot if I happened across some water spinach.  And having purchased some water spinach in Chinatown last week (and having purchased the shrimp paste at Bangkok Center Grocery the week before that), I decided it was time to go ahead and roll the dice and see if I liked this dish any better when it's homemade.

And the answer was yes, I did.  Our water spinach wasn't nearly as gritty (although I did get one or two mouthfuls with a hint of grittiness to them), which was probably the main reason that I liked our version better.  This version is no less funky or spicy than the one that they serve at Fatty Crab.  In fact, if I were to make this dish again at home, I would probably up the amount of water spinach while leaving the amount of spice paste the same, to de-funk the dish just a tad more.  There's nothing wrong with a little funk, but with the funky level as it is I can only eat so much of this dish before I suffer from palate burnout.  The dried shrimp paste has such an aggressively shrimpy flavor, and once you add in more dried shrimp, shallots, garlic and chilis, it is an incredibly pungent and aggressive spice paste.  Cooking it mellows it a little bit, but not a ton, so the end result remains very assertive.  Oh and if you have an exhaust fan in your kitchen you are going to want to get it going full blast before you fry the paste.  The chilis in the paste will make you cough and the smell of the paste really lingers.  Unfortunately, we don't have one in our apartment here in NYC and our apartment smelled like this dish for days.  Oops. 

Recipe after the jump!

Spinach with Sesame and Garlic

I am always looking for new easy vegetarian side dishes.  When it comes down to it, Alex is usually in favor of forgoing a vegetable side dish to an Asian meal in favor of rice.  As he said to me about 10 minutes ago "rice is a vegetable, it grows."  He usually enjoys the vegetable sides that we make (he particularly likes Sichuan Cucumbers), but as far as Alex is concerned, rice is always the better and easier option.  But sometimes I stick to my guns because I freaking love vegetables and because I am determined that Alex and I try to eat healthier when possible.  I'm totally on board with making pork belly and steak from time-to-time, so long as we balance it out with the occasional vegetarian meal.  I have briefly contemplated doing Meatless Mondays, but sometimes on Mondays I just want fried chicken.  Or a steak.  So long as we commit to having one vegetarian meal a week, I don't think it matters if it is on Monday, Friday, or Sunday.  I will admit that we have been terrible about eating vegetarian meals recently, as we are every winter.  Winter rolls around and I want heavier, fattier foods.  Then spring appears and with it I want salads, vegetables, and more fruit.  As soon as the farmer's markets come back to life I can't wait to experiment with veggies.  Today at the greenmarket behind the American Museum of Natural History I picked up some beautiful purple Peruvian fingerling potatoes and some honeycrisp apples.  As soon as squash season rolls around I will come home with all kinds of squash and eggplant to cook.  But until then, I will have to content myself with the staples that I can pick up in the grocery store - like baby spinach, napa cabbage, arugula, English cucumbers, and mushrooms.

I needed a nice and easy Japanese side dish to go with the Sake-Steamed Chicken we were preparing for dinner and this simple sauteed spinach dish seemed like the easiest choice.  It was my attempt to make goma-ae (spinach with sesame dressing).  The best thing about the recipe is that it is quick and easy to prepare, but flavorful.

Recipe after the jump!

Maple-Roasted Delicata Squash and Spinach Catalan-Style

If you're like me, you have no idea what delicata squash is.  But we ended up with a couple of random squash from the CSA and had to figure out first what it was and then how to cook it.  So I handed a squash to Alex and told him to start Googling.  A few minutes and one Wikipedia entry on squash varieties later, Alex told me that the squash we had been given was a sweet potato squash aka delicata squash.  And just for the record, there are way more varieties of squash out there than I realized!  I mean, who has ever heard of turban squash?  Anyway, we decided to simply roast the delicata squash as if it were a butternut squash with maple syrup, butter, and brown sugar.  As with roasting butternut squash, you end up with an amazingly flavorful layer of squash, with a bland layer down below that never came into contact with the maple syrup mixture.  Alex called it the "Tale of Two Squashes."  Yes, my husband is a dork.  But that's ok, because so am I.  It takes one to know one I guess.  Back to the squash.  Those bites you get where the sugar and syrup formed a nice caramelized crust on the squash are simply amazing.  I highly recommend using just a pinch of cayenne pepper on the squash because I think it really makes the flavors come together.  Otherwise you would just end up with a really sweet squash dish, without any complexity to it.

To go with the squash we decided to cook up the spinach that also came from our CSA.  We have a recipe for Spinach Catalan-Style from Spain: A Culinary Road Trip by Mario Batali that I really enjoy because it is tasty, easy, and best of all, it comes together in minutes.  I really enjoy the combination of the buttery pine nuts, the sweet currants, and the fresh sauteed spinach.  The first time I made the recipe I was a little skeptical that it didn't contain garlic or onions.  I quickly realized that it didn't need either.  This is probably one of the quickest and easiest side dishes in our repertoire.

Recipe after the jump!

Baked Eggs with Bacon and Spinach

 

Tonight was another one of those nights where I had no inspiration for dinner, except that I had a few recipes dogeared in the September issue of Bon Appetit.  After looking through those recipes, the only one that we could make with the ingredients we had on hand was this recipe for Baked Eggs with Bacon and Spinach.  I have this thing for baked eggs.  I have made several different varieties with different cooking temperatures, different cooking times, and most importantly, different mix-ins.  One of my favorite versions of baked eggs was this Oeufs en Cocotte, which is creamier and cheesier than this version.  I also really love making baked eggs with Mexican chorizo, minced garlic, scallions, and cilantro - which is amazing when served with little toast soldiers made out of cornbread or a nice rustic bread.

This version of baked eggs was very good.  I liked the combination of eggs, bacon and spinach, but like Alex said, it was missing something.  It was all very tasty, but a little one note.  However, I really liked the idea of toasting the English muffins and layering them at the bottom of the ramekin so that they can really soak up all of the eggy, creamy goodness without becoming overly soggy. 

Recipe after the jump!

Catfish Simmered in Caramel Sauce

I always feel bad saying I didn't like a recipe.  I thought the catfish was mushy and the flavors were muddy.  Actually, I often think that with catfish.  I also thought that the sauce was rather sweet and one note.  But in the recipe's defense, Alex really enjoyed it.  And we modified the recipe quite a bit to use catfish fillets instead of catfish steaks.  I just didn't like it.  But I rarely like catfish.  I thought after we made the Crispy Catfish with Onions and Ginger from the same cookbook that I absolutely loved, that I was over my general dislike of catfish, but maybe not.  So again, I can't blame much of anything on the recipe itself.  Instead I think our modifications are to blame.

Then I made Komatsuna and Spinach Stir-Fried with Garlic.  Alex and I joined a CSA and I was super excited after we picked up our first batch of veggies today.  In addition to the komatsuna (aka Japanese Mustard Spinach) and the spinach, we also got dandelion greens, arugula, oregano, breakfast radishes, and scallions.  I can't wait to use all of them.  Since we were already going Vietnamese with the catfish, I decided to adapt a recipe intended for water spinach to use for our veggies this evening.  Again I thought the recipe was a little sweet, but once I topped it with a little sriracha I liked it, although I thought it could have used a touch of acid.  

Not our best dinner ever, but it was far from a bad meal.

Recipes after the jump!

Chinese Spinach with Oyster Sauce and Roasted Garlic

For our last Chinese New Year meal, I decided to go simple.  We had two pounds of yu choi (Chinese spinach) sitting in the fridge, and a pound of shrimp that I defrosted last night.  Unfortunately, the shrimp wasn't quite defrosted.  But after realizing just how much yu choi we had, we decided that we didn't need the shrimp after all.  And after a week of fairly elaborate and/or heavy meals, it was pretty nice to just sit back and stir-fry some veggies.  We took this recipe from The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook, which has become my go-to for easy weeknight Asian meals, and modified it just slightly.

Served with some steamed rice, this was a very satisfying light meal.  These stir-fried veggies would be a perfect side dish to almost any Chinese meal.  I would eat it with Chinese roast pork, roast duck, salt and pepper shrimp - just about anything.  It is both sweet and savory.  The roasted garlic is delicious.  Definitely don't skimp on the garlic or the ginger.

Recipe after the jump!

"Saag Paneer"

I will be the first to admit that I am not an authority on saag paneer.  The last time I had saag paneer was roughly 2 years ago and it was from a mediocre buffet.  While Indian buffets can be fabulous, this one was decidedly not.  The saag paneer there reminded me of baby food.  It looked like it had been pureed, mixed with cream cheese or heavy cream, and then studded with pallid chunks of paneer cheese.  Thinking back, I guess it looked like creamed spinach, only the spinach was seriously pureed, thus the nod to baby food.  I wasn't a huge fan of my last saag paneer experience and have been in no rush since then to try it again.

Then I bought a brick of paneer cheese on my epic shopping trip last weekend, so I had to figure out something to do with it.  I love sauteed spinach, so I figured I would try to make up my own saag paneer recipe, one that used sauteed spinach that wasn't pureed into a consistency that belonged in a Gerber baby food jar.  I also decided that my take on saag paneer would use more spices and no cream.  While cream definitely improves some dishes, it just seemed strange here.  And since Alex is out of town, I figured I could experiment in the kitchen more than usual - if dinner didn't turn out, only I would suffer.  Sometimes it's nice to have someone to use as a guinea pig, but sometimes it's best to try new things out on yourself before subjecting anyone else to them.

So I went in the kitchen and started deciding what I would throw into my saag paneer.  First I sauteed some spinach with onions, garlic, jalapeno, ginger, diced tomatoes and spices.  Next, I pan-fried the paneer cubes to give them some texture.  And then I threw them all together with turmeric, garam masala, ground roasted cumin seeds, cinnamon, ground coriander, s&p.  I'm not sure which (if any) of those spices traditionally go in saag paneer, but one of my favorite things about Indian food is the variety of spices used.  And when I did some brief online research to decide exactly what I should throw into my saag paneer, it seemed like you could throw in pretty much everything and call it saag paneer, so long as you used spinach and paneer.  So I took a little artistic license.  I pretty much started throwing things into the pan willy-nilly (including a heaping tablespoon of cilantro chutney I had made this morning) and what resulted from my experimentation far exceeded my expectations.  The sauteed spinach mixture was delicious!  It probably didn't taste anything like saag paneer is "supposed" to taste, but that's just fine with me! 

Recipe after the jump!