Pumpkin Cornbread

For whatever reason I have been thinking about making pumpkin cornbread for a long time.  I can't even remember where I got the idea, but I have been holding on to a can of canned pumpkin with the intent of making some cornbread forever now.  Christmas was the perfect opportunity to finally make it because cornbread sounded like the perfect accompaniment for the Roast Duck Breasts with Pomegranate-Chile Sauce that I was planning on making.  Actually, there is a little backstory to the duck.  I was originally planning on making an Andrea Reusing recipe (Roast Moulard Duck with Kumquats and Salt-Cured Chiles), but after hitting 8 grocery stores in two days on the UWS and UES in search of kumquats (including both Fairways, Zabars, Citarella, Dean and Deluca, Whole Foods, Food Emporium and West Side Market) I had to admit defeat.  The only kumquats I found were at D&D and they were both ridiculously expensive and squishy, which freaked me out.  So I decided to change plans in the middle of the UES Fairway and make my back-up duck recipe.  Of course I hit one more grocery store that day after Fairway and low and behold, Eli's had fresh kumquats.  Once I made that discovery I sent Alex a text with some four-letter words because by that point I had called an audible and switched recipes.  Oh well.  But in the end it was a good thing that I switched recipes because this cornbread would not have gone quite as well with the other duck recipe.  The interesting thing about this cornbread is that the cinnamon and nutmeg carry through so clearly.  I didn't really taste the pumpkin, but I tasted a whole lot of pumpkin pie-like spices and that was kind of enough for me.  Served with some homemade honey butter this was an interesting take on cornbread.  I'm not sure under what circumstances and with what dish I would make this cornbread again (maybe some sort of chili), but I'm glad I made it this time.

P.S.  I thought I took pictures of the cornbread, but apparently I forgot to do so when we had it for dinner.  And then I threw away the few remaining pieces of the cornbread prior to finishing this post.  Oops.  No pictures for you - just think golden, slightly orange (and not yellow) cornbread and you're halfway there.

Recipe after the jump!

Lemon Shortbread with Fresh Rosemary

There is a coffee shop near my office called Blue Bottle that has the most amazingly decadent shortbread cookies.  They have two kinds of shortbread - an olive oil rosemary shortbread and a savory parmesan shortbread with fennel (which I will be making the next time we have people over because they are absolutely delicious - recipe available here).  Both of them are buttery and scrumptious, but I was looking for a dessert cookie so I decided to make some rosemary shortbread.  I spent a few minutes searching for a recipe and then came across a few different lemon and rosemary shortbread recipes that sounded promising.  So I picked one, threw together the dough and left it in the fridge to chill.  And then it kept chilling for a few days until I had the time to bake it because Alex cut me off on baking and cooking on Christmas Day since I made fudge that morning (more on that later) and we were already making duck, brussels sprouts, cornbread and salad for dinner.  Suffice it to say that I get a little over-ambitious sometimes and Alex has to rein me in.

These shortbread cookies are exactly the type of elegant little cookies I think should be served at high tea.  Or at a wedding/baby shower.  They are light, fresh and very easy to munch on.  The flavors of the lemon and rosemary are pronounced, but are balanced nicely by the buttery flavor of the shortbread and the crunch of the turbinado sugar sprinkled on top.  Brief side note - turbinado sugar is one of my favorite baking ingredients because it gives you those little bursts of sweetness and that nice crunch on top.  You have to be a little careful when baking with an herb like rosemary because a little goes a long way and you don't want to feel like you are eating a pine tree.  I felt like this was the perfect amount.  I do have one caveat - if you served a platter full of homemade chocolate chip cookies on one side and these shortbread cookies on the other they might be overlooked, but on their own they shine quite nicely.


Recipe after the jump!

Roast Duck Breasts with Pomegranate-Chile Sauce

It looks like today is a poultry day.  I started off the morning with a post about roast chicken breasts and now I am following it up with roast duck breasts.  I have a number of other posts that I could substitute for this one, but I am kind of digging the poultry theme I have going on so I am going to stick with it.  Anyway, this duck recipe is what I served Alex and my father for Christmas dinner.  There were other sides and such that went with it (including a version of this salad to which we added radishes and cherry tomatoes and a pumpkin cornbread - more on the cornbread later).  Since I was cooking I got to pick the recipes and duck was a no brainer because it is is one of my absolute favorite things to eat.  As far as I am concerned, a nice Peking duck is one of the finest meals in the world (a nice seared duck breast is a close second).  Brussels sprouts were another no brainer because I love them dearly and they are easy to roast.  This duck breast is one of those dishes that is more than the sum of its parts.  When I first tried the pomegranate-chile sauce I wasn't sure what I thought - it had a lot of flavor from the pomegranate juice, the adobo sauce and the dried chiles.  It was interesting, but I wasn't sure how it would go with the duck.  In some ways it almost reminded me of a really refined take on a BBQ sauce (if BBQ sauce ever involved pomegranates).  Duck is fatty enough and flavorful enough in its own right to work well with fairly aggressive sauces and seasonings, but I was a little worried that this might be taking it a little too far.  But once I tried a mouthful that combined the duck, the sauce and the little pomegranate seeds, I realized that it all came together really well.  The duck is rich, but the sweet, tart flavor of the pomegranate seeds and the slightly sweet, slightly spicy sauce make a really nice dish.  Given that the sauce starts with a caramel, I really expected it to be a little sweeter than it was, but the caramel gave it a nice deep, subtle sweetness to balance out the chiles.  I didn't think it was at all spicy (but if you have a more sensitive palate you might disagree), although the flavors of the chiles and adobo were definitely present.  You might need to modify the cooking times if your duck breasts are particularly large or small, but as written I think the recipe is pretty spot on for normal duck breasts.  This isn't the world's most refined and elevated duck recipe, but it is a very interesting and beautiful one.  Plus the colors were pretty perfect for Christmas if I may say so myself.

Recipe after the jump!

Roast Chicken Breasts with North African Spice Paste

I know that I blather on fairly often about how the flavor of a dish would be improved by grilling over an open flame.  But this dish wasn't just written for the grill, it was literally made to be grilled (which makes sense because the original recipe was "Grilled Chicken Breasts with North African Spice Paste").  The combination of spices would be absolutely magical grilled along with a nice crispy skin that grilling can give you.  Don't get me wrong - this was still a really nice and well-seasoned roast chicken breast without the flavor of the fire from the grill.  It was also an insanely juicy roast chicken breast.  But the grill would have punched the flavors up a few notches and made it really sing.  And we got a little nervous searing off the chicken skin in the cast iron because we didn't want the spices to burn and turn acrid from the direct contact with the hot pan, which would be less likely over the indirect heat of the grill.  You also wouldn't lose quite as much of the spice paste over the grill as you would in a pan.  Either way, until I get a grill I am going to continue to make this recipe on the stove top because it is a really different and fun take on roast chicken breasts, which we make all the time, plus it involves ingredients that we always have in the apartment so it's easy to throw together.

P.S.  If you haven't noticed yet, a busy December at work has caused a serious back log for me with posts.  There will be a few more coming today and over the weekend.  Barring any craziness I should be caught up after this weekend, but I make no promises.

Recipe after the jump!

Thanksgiving 2012 - Soy-Sauce and Honey-Glazed Turkey, Mark Bittman's Green Beans with Crisp Shallots, Cranberry-Reisling Compote and Sweet Potato Gratin with Chile Spiced Pecans

I came up with the menu for Thanksgiving back in mid-November after spending a little while pouring through the Food & Wine website.  I quickly realized that they had a slideshow for various ethnic and regional Thanksgiving feats, including an "Asian-American Thanksgiving."  I was instantly hooked.  Alex's favorite thing about Thanksgiving with my parents has always been the Sichuan cucumbers that my mother makes and the Soy-Sauce and Honey-Glazed Turkey sounded like the perfect centerpiece to a meal featuring my American father, my Chinese mother, a number of her Chinese siblings and a batch of Sichuan cucumbers.  We only ended up making one dish from the slideshow, but since it was the turkey I think that deserves a shout out. 

I thought the turkey had really good flavor and was very moist, although I wish that the flavors of the honey and soy-sauce mixture really seeped down into the meat a little more.  With that said, I think it was the best turkey we have made for Thanksgiving to date, although I think we have made better gravies.  Unfortunately the picture looks a little ridiculous - nothing that I did made the turkey lay flat on its back.  It just kept keeling over left and right until I admitted defeat.  The sweet potatoes were perhaps my second favorite dish from Thanksgiving.  They were really good.  I was a little worried about the dish for a number of reasons, including the fact that I bought white sweet potatoes and didn't realize that the flesh inside would be this weird light yellow color (which looked kind of sickly against the roasted marshmallows), but the flavor was really good.  They almost looked like applesauce mixed into mashed potatoes.  The color was really weird and slightly off-putting.  I actually considered leaving the sweet potatoes at home rather than bringing them with me because they were such an odd color. I wish I had taken a picture (even thought the picture would have been horrible), but I didn't have time.  I was also worried that they would be too sweet, but in the end I think they were just right.  Mark Bittman's green beans were nice, although the shallots and almonds tended to fall straight to the bottom and without any shallots or almonds to liven them up, they were a little blah.  The cranberry compote marked our third attempt at cranberry sauce, none of which has been a smashing success.  I'm not sure if the heirloom cranberries we are buying at the farmers' market are more bitter than your average grocery store cranberry or if I am extremely sensitive to bitterness, but the past few batches have been too bitter to eat without the addition of a large amount of additional honey or sugar.  I would say that these cranberries ended up being our most successful to date by far, but I added about 1/4 cup of honey to them after they cooled to get them to that point.

P.S.  Sorry for the delay on this post but there was a whole camera/hard drive debacle.  If you want to read more about it, you can look at my Thanksgiving 2012 Desserts post.  I'm not going to repeat the whole story here, but suffice it to say that I am a wee bit forgetful sometimes. 

Recipes (and more pictures) after the jump!

Thanksgiving 2012 Desserts - Salted Chocolate Pecan Pie, Peanut Butter Cup Pie and Lemon Curd Tart with Olive Oil

This post is almost ridiculously overdue.  But I forgot my camera at home when I went down to Maryland for Thanksgiving so I had my father take pictures of our dinner.  He helpfully uploaded all of the pictures to my trusty external hard drive, which I then promptly forgot to bring back to NYC with me.  So the pictures languished in Maryland until Dad came up to visit for Christmas and brought my hard drive with him.  Yay!  So I am finally ready to post about the dishes we made for Thanksgiving this year.  Better late than never, right?  And I guess that having a picture of at least one of the items, is better than not having any pictures at all.  Oops.

This salted chocolate pecan pie was my first attempt at making my own pie crust and I think that I really should have added a little more water to make it hold together.  My pie crust needs a little work.  I need to practice making the crust itself and then folding the edges so they are pretty.  For the record, the pie crust looked a little better before we packed it in the car for the drive down to Maryland and Alex squished it with his laptop bag.  Twice.  The filling was really tasty (and rich, which pecan pie should be), although I didn't really get the salt as much as I wish I had.  Also, the pie never really set up.  We baked it for the recommended time and then added a tiny bit more time, but when we cut into it that evening there was some serious oozing.  As for the peanut butter cup pie, I don't think I have ever served a richer dessert.  If you think pecan pie is rich, you have never experienced this peanut butter cup pie.  It was good but it was really sweet and really really rich.  The crust also didn't hold together as well as I would have liked - perhaps I need more butter if I ever make it again?  The lemon curd tart was perhaps my favorite of the desserts.  The lemon curd filling was lovely and I loved the flavor of the olive oil in the dessert.  I thought it was a really nice touch.  But if you are looking at the recipe and thinking about using a 10-inch tart pan instead of a 9-inch tart pan, don't do it.  We unwittingly made that mistake and then had to double the filling because the amount the recipe produced just wasn't going to cut it.  And then our crust was too thin.  Of the three recipes I would be most likely to make the lemon curd tart again (and make it exactly as written).  If I were to make the salted chocolate pecan pie again it would take some additional cooking time and perhaps a different crust...  If I am being entirely honest, I probably wouldn't make the peanut butter cup pie again.  I just think there are better peanut butter pie recipes out there.

Recipes after the jump!

Pork Belly Ssam with Mustard Seed Sauce

In trying to figure out what Alex and I should make for Christmas I got hung up on a few items we had in our freezer - pork belly and duck breasts.  Now I know that ham and goose are more traditionally served at Christmas but sometimes you have to improvise.  We didn't have ham or goose in the freezer and I don't really like goose anyway.  As far as I was concerned, the pork belly and duck breasts were far superior alternatives.

Once we settled on pork belly for Christmas Eve I decided that we should make this David Chang recipe from Momofuku that I have been saving up for a lazy Sunday.  This is one of those recipes that needs plenty of time because it is kind of crazy and labor-intensive.  So we threw the sugar and salt brine early that morning and let it hang out in the fridge for 10 hours before roasting the pork belly in the oven.  While the pork belly was roasting we pickled the mustard seeds and then made the sauce.  If you count the brining time the meal probably took a good 12-3 hours to make and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure it was worth it.  Our pork was insanely salty (even though we used maybe half of the salt-sugar mixture).  I wish we had rinsed off the salt-sugar mixture before roasting the pork belly.  That might have made all of the difference in the world because the flavor of the pork belly itself would have been really nice if it weren't for the intensely oversalted exterior.  It was also verging on being too caramelized on the outside.  I love a good bark on the outside of my BBQ, but the sugar and salt here formed a pretty hard crust on the outside of the pork.  It wasn't burnt, but I think if we had left the pork belly in the oven for another 5-10 minutes it would have been.  Rinsing off the sugar-salt mixture might have helped out there too.  Or perhaps we should have modified the cooking temperature/time to cut down on the crust on the outside.  Beyond the pork belly itself, I didn't actually enjoy the sauce that much.  I love coarse Dijon mustard, but this almost reminded me of the sauce for potato salad.  I think it was the combination of mustard and mayonnaise...  All things considered I would say that this dish wasn't a smashing success, but it wasn't an abject failure either.  It just needed a lot of tweaks.  And since we live in NYC, maybe the solution is to just go to Momofuku Ssam and get the dish there, rather than trying to re-create it at home.

Recipe after the jump!