Salmon with Lemon-Pepper Sauce and Watercress-Herb Salad

Look!  No brown!  Well, a little brown but there is only so much I can do about the color of my dining room table.  But it's still a pretty dish, huh?  Salmon and greens look so pretty together.  There were supposed to be lemons on this dish too, which would have been even prettier, but we ran out.  Oops.  This is what happens when I am busy with work.  Suddenly we run out of staples.  Right now we are out of lemons, scallions and coffee (which Alex would consider a staple and I would not).  But we have plenty of yogurt, sandwich bread, peanut butter, OJ and ice cream (Alex's staples) because he ran out and stocked up yesterday.  I go to the grocery store for things like salmon, pomegranate seeds, dark chocolate and cockles.  And then I go to the farmers' market for tomatoes, fresh corn, and other randomness (like the lemon basil, Thai basil and avocado squash I picked up today).  Alex goes to the grocery for yogurt and sandwich bread.  Clearly we have different priorities.  Haha.  Every household needs someone like Alex to buy the bare necessities for daily survival and someone like me to keep track of what we have, what we need and then go to the grocery store and buy all sorts of randomness.  You never know when you might need some creme fraiche for example.  Speaking of creme fraiche, that ugly white smear to the left of the salmon is the creme fraiche-based lemon pepper sauce for the salmon.  See?  It totally comes in handy.

This salmon dish was one of the more interesting meals we have made recently.  The salmon on its own is more than a little sweet.  But when you take a bite with the watercress-herb salad, it works really well.  The same thing goes for the lemon-pepper sauce.  All of the components are a little overpowering (in one way or another) on their own, but they work together really well when you combine them all.  The sweet, richness of the salmon gets balanced against the freshness and acidity of the watercress-herb salad, which is then balanced against the brightness of the lemon-pepper sauce.  Somehow it all works.  Is it my favorite salmon dish ever?  No.  But it's pretty and it's tasty.

Recipe after the jump!

Italian Bison Burger

I just realized how brown all of my recent posts have been.  And I guess this one is pretty brown too, but at least you get the red of the tomato and the green of the fresh basil leaves, right?  So it's not TOO brown.  Just a little bit brown...  I promise to get some color on here soon that isn't brown!  Maybe tomorrow?  Or maybe tonight.  I do have some pretty exciting recipes planned out for this evening.  Anyway, I know we make a lot of burgers.  We can't help it.  Or I can't.  Burgers are easy to make, easy to play with, and satisfying to eat.  You can use whatever ground meat you have on hand and season it in any way you wish.  I know in the past we have made Korean-inspired burgers, Vietnamese-inspired burgers, Japanese burgers...  Actually, it looks like we have managed to hit all of Asia and very little of Europe.  This time we made an Italian-inspired burger with lots of fresh basil, fresh mozzarella, prosciutto and a really nice beefsteak tomato from the farmer's market.  Nothing groundbreaking, but a nice meal.  And since we used ground bison instead of ground beef it's not actually that unhealthy!

Recipe after the jump!

Fried Meatballs and Simple Cucumber Salad

Sorry for being so delinquent lately.  Work has been really crazy.  But I have a few posts that are teed up and ready to go, so you guys can expect a flurry of posts over the next 4-5 days!  Hurray!  This meal was one of Alex's picks.  Actually, the Fried Meat Balls were his pick and the Simple Cucumber Salad was mine.  I had asked him to figure out a recipe to use up the rest of the ground pork in the fridge and this recipe from Rasamalaysia was what he came up with.  And since Alex rarely comes up with recipes that he wants to make I decided to go with it, even though I was a little skeptical.  Don't get me wrong - I love pork, I love meatballs and I love Chinese food.  So I'm not exactly sure what there was to be skeptical about with the exception of the name.  "Fried Meatballs" sounds a little weird and a lot heavy.  So I decided to make this cucumber salad to counteract that heaviness inherent in both meaty food and fried food.  According to Chinese tradition cucumbers are "cooling" (which to me means fresh and light).  I tend to pair cucumber salads of various sorts with dishes that either sound really heavy or sound really spicy.  It just seems like such a perfect pairing to me.

Fried Meatballs are (as most would expect) quite tasty.  They had really excellent flavor and a nice texture.  When I took my first bite I asked Alex if there was any cinnamon in there and then I remembered that there was some five-spice.  The perfume and flavors of the five-spice powder really comes through in the meatballs in a delicious way.  For those of you who turned your noses up at the addition of fish paste and fish sauce, it's like adding anchovies into sauces.  It doesn't make the dish taste fishy - it just gives it a really nice depth of flavor.  My one complaint about the meatballs is that I wish there had been some sort of sauce.  They weren't dry exactly, but I think that almost every meatball or meat patty could use some sort of sauce.  Alex and I briefly discussed how some sauce with a thick, aioli-type consistency would have been marvelous with these meatballs because it would have provided some moisture, flavor and textural constrast.  A really loose sauce (like a dumpling dipping sauce) would have made the meatballs soggy.  I guess sriracha would work in a pinch.  Actually, I kind of wish I had thought of that at the time.  We could have made some sort of sriracha mayo or something.  Oh well.  As for the cucumbers, they are exactly what they claim to be - simple.  I think I have made (and eaten) cucumber salads that I like more, but they were a really nice light, simple side dish for our meatballs.

Recipes after the jump!

Ma Po Tofu

Before I lived in China I was fairly certain that tofu was evil.  Well, maybe not evil but I certainly thought it was bland and far from delicious.  But once I was in China I realized that tofu can actually be really tasty.  It can also be very stinky, but that's beside the point.  Ma Po Tofu is one of my favorite tofu dishes (as well as one of my favorite Sichuan dishes).  But there are some really bad versions out there.  I have had one that I can think of in New York where the tofu was swimming in a puddle of very spicy, but otherwise flavorless oil.  And then I have had the truly phenomenal version at Little Pepper in Flushing. This version falls somewhere in the middle.  It was neither the best, nor the worst version of ma po tofu that I have ever eaten.  It was good, but it was missing the exact balance of flavors and spice that I enjoy in the best renditions of Sichuan cuisine.  Part of the problem was that our Sichuan peppercorns are getting old and have lost a lot of their pungency.  I think it's time to head out the Flushing for a fresh batch.  There wasn't as much of the slightly sour, numbing flavor of the Sichuan peppercorns as I wanted.  And Alex complained that the dish also didn't have enough chili flavor from the Sichuan chilis in the dish.  So it seems like lack of chili-flavor is our chief complaint.  It was also just a little too oily for me.  If I were to make the dish again I would definitely cut down on the amount of oil.  Other than that I just don't know...

Recipe after the jump!

Baked Eggplant "Fries"

When we were at the farmers' market looking for for some fun new ingredients last weekend I saw a few beautiful purple eggplants that I couldn't resist.  They were so pretty and purple - a beautiful glossy lavender.  I was really looking for Asian eggplant, rather than regular eggplant, but I just had to buy these guys.  And then when it came time to cook them I had no idea what to do with them.  I had a pasta recipe that called for eggplant, but we just had pasta for lunch on Sunday and then I ate the leftovers yesterday.  So we made eggplant fries.  And I found a recipe in Mario Batali's Spain: A Culinary Road Trip cookbook for Fried Eggplant.  It sounded pretty awesome.  But I didn't want to fry anything (I included the recipe anyway).  I love fried zucchini sticks, and we have had some success making baked zucchini sticks.  So we made some eggplant "fries."  For our first epic fail of the evening we whipped up a bunch of Italian-Style Breadcrumbs and then tried to coat the eggplant.  It just wasn't working.  So we looked up a recipe for baked eggplant and found one that used a Greek yogurt mixture to make the breadcrumbs stick to the eggplant.  It seemed like a great idea so we went ahead and stole it, changing the seasonings and ingredients so they better suited the flavors of our breadcrumbs.  Once we successfully breaded the eggplant fries we started trying to whip up a sauce.  Epic fail #2 of the evening - a homemade aioili.  I'm not sure exactly what went wrong, but it never emulsified and thickened.  I looked up some recipes that said you need to use room temperature egg yolks.  That was probably our first error.  Lord only knows what else we did wrong.  Epic fail #3 - I think we killed our mini-prep.  Oops.  So these eggplant fries were good.  They were interesting and a fun way to eat eggplant, but not a showstopper.  After our failure with the aioli we had to scrounge around for a sauce and we tried serving them with mayo (Alex's suggestion and it worked pretty well) and ketchup.  I think if we had the aioli it would have been really nice, but what can you do.

Recipes after the jump!

Pasta with Sun Gold Tomatoes

Prior to seeing this recipe by Mario Batali in Bon Appetit, I had never heard of a sun gold tomato and I was fairly certain that it would be close to impossible to find some.  I was determined to find sun golds so I could try this recipe because I love Batali, but I figured it would take me all summer to do so.  And then on Friday when I was walking around the farmers' market at Rockefeller Center there they were.  I couldn't believe it!  Suddenly I see them everywhere.  And not only do I see the tomatoes everywhere, I see recipes for them everywhere - pasta with sun gold tomatoes, sun gold tomato gazpacho, sun gold tomato salsa...  I can't wait to try more of them now that I know how amazing those little yellow/orange cherry tomatoes really are.  They are really sweet and just gorgeous.  I love how great the tomatoes are in mid to late summer.  The next time I run to the farmers' market I'm going to pick up a few more pints of sun golds so I can play with them a little more.  One pint is going to be set aside so I can make this recipe again.  Because this pasta is just as gorgeous as the little tomatoes themselves.  The best thing about many of Mario Batali's pasta recipes are so simple, and yet so delicious.  His Spaghetti with Garlic and Oil is the perfect example.  You don't need a ton of ingredients because the ingredients play off each other so harmoniously.  His pastas are far more than the sum of their parts.  In this pasta dish you have the ideal amount of sauce and toppings to coat the pasta while ensuring that the pasta itself can shine.  In each bite you can taste the sweet acidity of the tomatoes, the sweet basil, the heat of the crushed red pepper flakes and the salty Pecorino Romano cheese.  It's a perfect summery dish that really shows off the tomatoes, the basil and the pasta, all at the same time and all in perfect balance.
 

Recipe after the jump!

Pan-Grilled Beer-Marinated Hanger Steak

First things first.  Alex tells me I have to apologize for how ugly this picture is.  Sorry guys.  Not every picture (or dish) comes out as well as I wish it would.  A pile of steak on a plate never looks very appetizing without a fabulous side dish, but the Grilled Peach Panzanella Salad we prepared with this one didn't fit on the plate.  And if we tried to serve them on the same plate, the salad ended up looking all gorgeous while the steak looked like an afterthought.  Oh well.  I guess that was kind of indicative of how I felt about the two dishes.  The peach salad was a wonderfully composed and flavorful dish, while the steak just came off a little flat in comparison.  Don't get me wrong, the steak is not bad at all (and I admit that I am probably being overly picky).  But it just couldn't compare.  Furthermore, I am of the opinion that with steaks you should really taste the beef (otherwise why bother eating steak) and in this recipe I felt like the marinade masked, rather than complimented, the inherent rich beefiness of the hanger steak.  There was a little too much going on with the marinade for it to really appeal to the carnivore in me, but not quite enough going on for it to really excite me.  Like I said, I'm being a little too picky here, but so be it. 

Recipe after the jump!