Soba Noodles with Sesame Roasted Eggplant

So I have to apologize for a rather extended absence (for me) from the blog.  Work went from busy to absolute insanity and I haven't eaten dinner at home for over a week.  Yeah.  And it's not like I have been going out to dinner - I have been eating dinner at my desk.  Every night.  Seamless Web is my new best friend.  Last night I didn't actually eat dinner, but after working so many days around the clock all I wanted to do was have a glass (or two) of wine and then pass out.  So that is what I did.  But now that I finally got home at a reasonable hour this evening, we are cooking!  And after all of those nights eating random food at my desk, all I want is a meal that is on the lighter side with vegetables - lots and lots of vegetables.  And with the CSA and my week-long absence, all we really have in the fridge is vegetables, so it works out.

When I started thinking light and vegetarian, somehow I started thinking about tossing eggplant in sesame oil and shichimi togarashi, before roasting it and serving it on top of a cold soba noodle salad.  Then I started thinking that a cold noodle salad topped with hot eggplant sounded a little weird, so I decided to serve the eggplant on top of a warm soba noodle salad.  After a week of catered lunches and delivered dinners at my desk, this was such a lovely home-cooked meal.  It was everything I wanted it to be, although Alex was trying to figure out how to cook the eggplant differently.  Perhaps next time we will broil it to give it a little more char on the outside, and a nice smooth interior that just melts in your mouth.  I see what he means, but I liked the dish fine the way it was.  The flavors were really nice, and this was the perfect meal to (almost) end a long busy week with.

Recipe after the jump!

Tomato Sauce with Butter and Onions

Do you ever hold onto recipes that you want to make and months later (or even years later) realize that you still haven't made them?  That's how this recipe was for me.  Some recipes you see and immediately know that you need to make them and you run to the grocery store and make them for dinner the very next day.  Others don't merit that degree of urgency and get pushed to the backburner while other, somehow more exciting, recipes are made.  Now the reason that this tomato sauce ever even crossed my radar was because I first stumbled across it right after eating at Scarpetta for the first time where I tried Alex's Spaghetti + Tomato & Basil.  It was mind-blowing.  So simple and yet so amazing.  It blew every other dish we ordered that night out of the water.  So I saw this recipe by Marcella Hazan and figured if Scott Conant (the chef at Scarpetta) can make something so amazing out of tomatoes and basil, I'm sure that Marcella Hazan (one of the foremost authorities on Italian cooking) can do the same.  And everytime I turned around it was almost as if another one of my favorite food blogs was giving Marcella's recipe a try.  First it was Rachel Eats, then Smitten Kitchen, then Steamy Kitchen, and most recently, Momofuku for 2.  At that point, I figured that if all of these great bloggers made (and enjoyed the recipe) I really needed to suck it up and bump it to the front of the line of recipes for the week.

So Thursday night Alex was in charge of following one of the simplest recipes to ever grace our little kitchen.  Unfortunately, I was stuck at work until 10:00 pm so I missed out on dinner entirely and had to wait until lunch Friday to give this pasta a shot.  We used bucatini as the pasta for the sauce because I really just love bucatini.  It's like spaghetti - only ten times better, with a completely different mouthfeel to it.  Anyway, what can I say about this sauce?  It is simple.  And very tasty.  It is very buttery and almost velvety in the way that it coats the pasta.  Is it mindblowing?  No.  But is it fairly stunning for all of its simplicity?  Absolutely.

Recipe after the jump!

Xi'an Famous Foods

Ever since I moved to NYC in 2006 I have been meaning to try Xi'an Famous Foods.  Up until recently you had to trek out to Flushing to eat at the Golden Mall if you wanted to try the restaurant, but sometime in the last year (I think January 2010, but it could have been December 2009) they opened a branch of the restaurant in Chinatown.  It was a huge deal, but somehow Alex and I never made the trek down there.  The problem with the Chinatown branch was that it was basically a take-out place with no seats or tables to eat at, just a counter.  And then in July 2010 they finally opened a branch with a few tables and seats in the East Village on St. Marks.  We finally made it down to the EV to try it out and boy was it worth the trip, even if we had to sit on a nearby bench to eat our food in Styrofoam containers because the restaurant itself was so packed!  So I apologize for our pictures, which are far from fantastic, but that's what you get when you eat from takeout containers on the sidewalk.  That yellow blob in the picture of our half-eaten pork burger above is one of the many taxis that went zooming by while we were eating.  How's that for atmosphere?

Liang Pi Cold Skin Noodles might not sound (or look) like much, but they are amazing.  The wheat noodles and tofu mixed together in a chili oil with cilantro and scallions are fantastic.  For the record, there is no skin of any sort involved.  I haven't tasted anything like them since I returned from China in 2005.  They were hands down our favorite dish.  We also tried the Savory Cumin Lamb Hand-Pulled Noodles and they were our second favorite dish of the evening.  The noodles were soft and doughy, but in the best way possible, and clearly homemade.  The lamb was very flavorful, with lots of cumin (which I love), but I wish the dish had a bit more of what the Chinese call "ma la" to it - that spicy, Sichuan peppercorn numbing pepper effect.  Instead the sauce was a little lighter than I had been expecting, but was still seriously delicious.  The last dish we tried tonight was the Stewed Pork Burger.  I was torn between the Savory Cumin Lamb Burger and the pork burger since Chowhounds are always debating which one is better, but I figured I would round out our meal with pork instead of more cumin lamb.  I really enjoyed the pork burger, but Alex thought it was just a tad dry, which isn't that surprising as Alex loves things saucier than I do.  

More (including more pictures) after the jump!

Thai Extravaganza: Corn Fritters and Chicken Red Curry

Tonight we went to pick our produce up from the CSA and when we got home I had to figure out what to do with the massive amounts of produce and the defrosted chicken fingers that as of 6:30 pm were residing in our fridge.  The first thing that came to mind for the chicken was a Thai red curry.  Afterall we had some Thai red curry paste in the fridge too.  Not to mention all kinds of canned and fresh vegetables.  To go with the Thai curry, we decided to make corn fritters.  Luckily our old school Thai cookbook had a recipe that we could adapt.  Somehow I always like the idea of curries more than I like the curries themselves.  The same held true for our curry this evening.  It was fine.  But the corn fritters were by far the star of the evening.  They were absolutely and astonishingly delicious.  I have had a version of these corn fritters at a Thai restaurant here in NYC and I remember them being doughier (but still good).  But these fritters consisted mostly of corn and more corn with very little filler - just like the very best crab cakes are mostly crab with very little filler.  Sure there is a little all-purpose flour and two eggs to bind the fritters together, along with scallions, garlic, cilantro, and a chili for flavor.  But the fritters are definitely all about the fresh, sweet and summery corn.  Dipped in some store-bought sweet chili sauce these fritters were sweet, savory, and just a little spicy.  Poor curry didn't even stand a chance.

Recipes after the jump!

Baked Squash Blossoms with Ricotta, Basil and Mint

Today at the farmer's market behind the Museum of Natural History I was struck by the number of vendors selling squash blossoms, as well as how lovely the squash blossoms looked.  Since we had no dinner plans for the evening, I picked up a dozen squash blossoms.  On our way home Alex and I were discussing what to do with our squash blossoms.  In the past we have had the most success when we made fritattas with our squash blossoms (once we tried to simply saute them and somehow it just wasn't very good).  We have been talking about making squash blossom quesadillas for awhile as well, but seeing as we just had quesadillas last Friday we wanted to try something else.  Instead we decided to make "fried" squash blossoms by breading them with panko breadcrumbs and then baking them in the oven.

So I would say these squash blossoms aren't one of our biggest successes, but they were quite good.  Alex said that the filling needed some crushed red pepper flakes and I might have to agree with him.  The filling definitely needed something additional to make it sing.  Perhaps if we had served the squash blossoms on top of a white pizza with lots of garlic, crushed red pepper flakes, and a little Italian parsley, or a pasta dish they would have been a star, but served on their own they didn't quite get there.  The filling was tasty - nice and fresh, and the breading was nicely crispy, but something was missing.  Perhaps a dipping sauce?  Or perhaps baked squash blossoms just can't compare with their fried counterparts.  Thoughts?

Recipe after the jump!

Eggplant Bruschetta

 
One of the problems with our CSA is that we often get one of each item, instead of several.  All of the recipes that I have earmarked for eggplants require several eggplants and at any given time I have only received one.  So I had to resort to new recipes.  This recipe was in my new favorite vegetarian-friendly cookbook, Molto Gusto: Easy American Cooking by Mario Batali and Mark Ladner.  We only had one eggplant, so I halved the recipe, which was easy enough to do.  While I'm not sure that this bruschetta was the most successful bruschetta that I have ever made, but it was quite tasty.  I never would have thought to make an eggplant dish with a combination of tomatoes, mint, and hot red pepper flakes, but it was delicious.  Unfortunately, the only bread we had was a levain sourdough boule, which wasn't quite the perfect match with the eggplant topping, but it was still quite tasty.

Recipe after the jump!

Carrot-Zucchini Bread with Candied Ginger

So I love carrot cake.  And I love zucchini bread.  But I have never combined the two.  The other day I was trying to recreate a zucchini bread recipe I made once before using candied ginger and came across this recipe online on the Chicago Sun-Times website.  The recipe sounded really interesting (the person who came up with combining carrots, zucchini, and ginger into a bread is the type of mad kitchen scientist that I would love to meet).  Better yet, through some vagary of fate we have all of the ingredients in the kitchen for once - with both the zucchini and the carrots coming from our CSA.  So that seemed like a definite sign to me that we had to make this bread, and we had to do it soon!  Although baking was the very last thing I wanted to do this evening after a long week at work, I figured if I didn't make the carrot-zucchini bread tonight, I was never going to make it.  So after we finished cleaning up from dinner, I started right on making yet another mess of the kitchen.  Have I mentioned recently how much Alex hates it when I bake because I tend to make huge floury messes?  Sorry hon.

This bread smelled delicious while it cooked.  I couldn't wait to cut off a huge slice and try it out.  The last time I baked with zucchini I made a Chocolate Zucchini Cake that was tasty, but you really couldn't taste the zucchini at all.  What I was hoping for here was a far more summery bread where the taste of zucchini and carrots would be far more evident.  If I were to make a cake version of this bread (which would require making it quite a bit sweeter), I would top it with some homemade cream cheese frosting.  I made one loaf with chopped walnuts for me, and one loaf without any nuts for Alex because he has a serious hatred of baked goods with nuts in them.  And boy was that a good call.  When Alex took a bite of his loaf his first words were "yummmm, I think this is kind of awesome."  And for the record, that is huge praise from Alex.  The bread isn't super moist, but the flavor is really nice.  I love the combination of the carrot, zucchini, ground ginger, candied ginger, and cinnamon.  Alex was right - it is kind of awesome.

Recipe after the jump!