Mission Chinese Food

With this post I am officially and gleefully jumping on the Mission Chinese bandwagon.  The place is AMAZING.  One of the best Asian meals - traditional, fusion or otherwise - I have had in a really long time.  If you find yourself anywhere near the LES of Manhattan and you enjoy spicy, interesting food, you should haul ass to Mission Chinese.  And then be prepared to wait because the place is tiny and well worth all of the buzz.  Or you could do what Alex and I did and trek down there from the UWS at 2:30 pm on a freakishly hot Sunday and avoid the wait.  But if you are like us and you are running late (which was only partially our fault) you might give yourself heat stroke or an aneurysm over worrying whether or not you are going to make it before they stop serving lunch at 3:00 pm, so you should weigh your options and decide whether you want to risk missing lunch (and the ensuing depression, etc) or whether you want to just bite the bullet and wait... 

More (including more more pictures) after the jump!

Green Beans (and Wax Beans) with Garlic Bread Crumbs and Tomatoes

This green bean dish is one that has been stuck in my head for months.  I'm not exactly sure why it is that every once in a great while I will read a totally random recipe that doesn't even involve any of my favorite ingredients and it will just get stuck in my head.  I like green beans, I like tomatoes and I like the sound of garlic bread crumbs, but I honestly have no idea why this particular recipe spoke to me.  Andrea Reusing serves the green beans with her fried chicken, but we went ahead and served it with a variation on our Spicy "Fried" Chicken Cutlets.  I say it was a variation because we used that same buttermilk and Tabasco marinade, but we marinated it for 8 hours instead of 1-2 hours (which I highly recommend if you have the time), crusted it with a mixture of cornmeal and panko without any cheese, mustard or herbs, and then pan-sauteed it rather than baking it in the oven.  I enjoyed this green bean salad - it was summery, tasty and fresh, perfect picnic fare.  Alex thought it required a few too many steps (particularly making the garlic bread crumbs), but said that if you had the bread crumbs already made that it would be worth making the dish again.  I think even without the pre-made bread crumbs it would be worth making again.  You would just need to find a use for the rest of the bread crumbs - which shouldn't be hard to do.  I would recommend using some of the remaining toasted bread to make the Italian-Style Bread Crumbs posted with this recipe, which keep for quite awhile and are totally delicious.  I think that would make it worthwhile.  Alternatively, if you already have some of those Italian-Style Bread Crumbs or other homemade bread crumbs at home, go ahead and use them.

Recipe after the jump!

Baked Eggs with Yogurt and Chile

This recipe was one that immediately drew me once I opened up Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London's Ottolenghi by Yotam Ottolenghi.  I can't express to you how much I love baked eggs.  It has gotten to the point where certain individuals (and I am not going to name names here, but you know who you are) make fun of my obsession with baked eggs.  I can't help it.  They are uber yummy.  Plus I am on a Middle Eastern kick of sorts right now so I am drawn towards anything with that flavor profile. 

I have to say that these eggs were very interesting, although not the most successful baked eggs we have ever made.  I liked the addition of the yogurt sauce and the addition of the chilis, but I'm not sure how I felt about the arugula.  I think in the future I would potentially use a different green (maybe spinach).  My biggest complaint was that it never quite felt like it came together at the level that I wanted it to.  It smelled great and looked delicious, but it was good (verging on, but not quite making it to, very good).  The bottom line is that it wasn't amazing and I wanted it to blow my mind.  I guess my expectations were set a little too high here...  We didn't use the sage or the amount of butter that the recipe called for, but we added some scallions and I think the butter level in our dish was more than sufficient.  If I had added more butter I worry that it would have felt heavy and/or greasy.  And sage sounded like an odd ingredient to me.  When I think sage I think Thanksgiving - stuffing, turkey, butternut squash.  I don't think arugula, eggs and Greek yogurt.  But maybe that's my bad.  It's entirely possible that if we had made the dish exactly as written that it would have been the mind blowing experience I was looking for.  Instead I had to settle for good. 

Recipe after the jump!

Grilled Zucchini with Burrata

This post includes a few things I never thought I would say.  First, I thought the recipe might have been better without the burrata.  That never happens because I love burrata.  Maybe fresh mozzarella would have worked better?  I don't know but the burrata just didn't seem to really work here.  It was lovely and creamy, but the flavor didn't really seem to work with the acidity of the white wine flavor and the flavors of the marinated zucchini.  And as much as I liked the flavor of the zucchini, it got a little old after awhile.  Maybe in the future I should mix it up and serve several different types of grilled vegetables in the same marinade (but perhaps cut down on the amount of vinegar just a touch) and leave out the cheese as a grilled vegetable platter.  That might work.  Second, the garlic and vinegar here were good in the first bite and then it got to be a bit much.  So I might cut back on those as well.  Otherwise...  Well that might be all I had to say because I can't think of anything else.  If I were to give the dish a grade it would be a B-.  We didn't hate it, but it certainly wouldn't make my list of dishes that we need to make again in the future.  I thought about not bothering to post it at all, but I figured I should own up to my recipe failures (and this wasn't exactly a failure) as well as my successes.  This one fell somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

Recipe after the jump!

Marinated Kale and Chickpea Salad with Sumac Onions

Sunday at the farmers' market I picked up a couple different varieties of extremely tender kale - one of which I had never seen or heard of before - from 5 lbs of Dirt.  The kale was tender enough that I didn't want to cook it, but still hearty enough (because it wasn't baby kale, which cost a whopping $8 per 1/4 lb and if I am brutally honest, my blog and I are not worth $8 per 1/4 lb) that I wanted to wilt it a little bit.  So often when we buy kale we end up braising it or otherwise cooking the bejesus out of it, but I wanted to serve the kale we bought at the market as close to its raw state as possible this time since it was so beautiful and tender.  So I dug through my stash of recipes to find this one, which I came across a few months ago in the midst of a recipe downloading blitz.  I remembered two things from reading the recipe.  First, that it was from a collection of vegan recipes.  Second, that the author of the recipe spent some time talking about wilting kale in dressing, which we have never tried before.  Actually, I guess I remembered a third thing, that the recipe was from Kenji at Serious Eats but that's not really relevant.  Last night we went ahead and "wilted" the kale in dressing.  And it worked out really well.  Actually, the whole recipe worked out really well.  Not only was the kale itself the perfect degree of tender, but the Dijon-based dressing was really nice and the sumac onions were fantastic.  I thought they added a really nice sweetness, flavor and texture to the salad.  It never would have occurred to me to first soak the onions to remove any harshness and then season the raw onions with spices and sesame seeds.  It was kind of a brilliant move if you ask me.  I was actually stealing them out of the bowl while we finished up our entree and eating the onions one by one with my fingers.  I'm like a small child.  But I would like to maintain that unlike a small child I make really good food!

Recipe after the jump!

Vietnamese Peach Relish and Fresh Green Peas and Sugar Snap Peas in Sesame Dressing

What do you do when you end up with tons of random farmers' market produce?  We had peaches, shelling peas, sugar snap peas, green beans, wax beans, cherry tomatoes and a bunch of other goodies in the fridge, so it struck me that tonight's meal had to involve at least a few of those ingredients.  I thought a bit and came up with this Vietnamese Peach Relish (served with seared halibut) and a green pea and sugar snap pea salad.  And then you make a salad the next night and another salad the night after that...  Anyway, this dish was one that I thought would be interesting, fresh and vibrant.  And it was all of those things.  Plus it looked pretty on the white plate we served it on.  But Alex and I came to the conclusion that this peach relish (for better or worse) could have been served with anything - grilled chicken breasts, shrimp, pork chops...  You didn't need to spend $20 a pound for halibut because it doesn't really do anything spectacular for the halibut that it couldn't do just as well for another protein.  If I had to pick a halibut recipe to make again, I would go with the Pistachio-Crusted Halibut with Spicy Yogurt that we made last week because that dish was phenomenal and really showed the halibut off nicely.  If I make the relish again (and I think that I will because I liked it and found it interesting) I might try it with a meat to see how it works out.  As for the peas, they were nice but I almost preferred them in their raw state to cooked because the soy sauce and the sesame oil obscured some of the natural sweetness and flavor of the peas.  I also think we needed to dry the peas off a little better so that the dressing would adhere a little better and not be diluted with the cold water that we rinsed the peas with.  My bad.

Recipes after the jump!

Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce

First and foremost, I wanted to say how excited I was when we bought Yotam Ottolenghi's new-ish vegetarian cookbook, Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London's Ottolenghi.  All of the recipes in there looked so interesting and the pictures were so beautiful, but I kept picking it up and putting it down because we already have so many freaking cookbooks.  I just didn't want to buy another.  But I am really excited that I finally caved.  Second, my pictures of this dish look awful compared to the pictures in the cookbook.  Just look at the cover of Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi and you can't help but be impressed by how utterly gorgeous his food (and the pictures of his food) is.  And then you look at my picture.  And the eggplant kind of looks like a... well I'm not going to say it because it's not at all appetizing.  But my pictures are nowhere near as pretty.   

Since this recipe is the picture on the front cover of the book and therefore a large part of the reason that I bought the book, I thought it was a fitting first dish for us to make.  And if this dish is representative of the other recipes in the cookbook, I am infinitely glad that we did.  Of the two of us, I thought that I would be a bigger fan of this dish but it turned out that Alex was.  He said that love was too strong of a word, but he "enjoyed" the dish and described it as having an interesting blend of flavors - the buttermilk/yogurt sauce was kind of tangy and the pomegranate gave it a nice sweetness without the whole thing being too sweet.  I would agree with all of his comments, but add that the fresh thyme was a really nice herbal (slightly floral) addition.  The eggplant itself was almost creamy and with the pop of the pomegranate seeds you ended up with a nice textural contrast as well.  My one complaint is that some bites of the dish just weren't as well seasoned as others, but you run into that problem with most roasted vegetables.  I know we make that comment/criticism of a lot of roasted squash recipes.  The layer of eggplant at the top that really absorbed the evoo and buttermilk sauce was delicious.  The layer that you scraped off the bottom (even after the addition of more buttermilk sauce) was less so.  All things considered it was a really interesting dish.  It was not my favorite dish that we have ever made, but the recipe is definitely worth trying.

Recipe after the jump!