Some recipes are far more trouble than they are worth. We have made more than our fair share of dishes that take hours and involve dirtying up every single pot and pan in the kitchen, but turn out to be just ok in the end. Other recipes are so simple and come together so quickly that you can't imagine that they will be that good in the end. And then they end up blowing you away. Those recipes are few and far between, but this dish happens to be one of them. There are less than 7 ingredients total in the entire dish, but there is so much flavor. The broad bean paste gives the dish heat, but what I really enjoyed is the combination of ground beef and Chinese celery. The meaty, rich flavor of the ground beef is a really good counterpoint to the grassy, distinctly herbal flavor (and crisp texture) of the Chinese celery. I don't know how substituting regular celery for the Chinese celery would affect the dish, but I would definitely be willing to give it a shot. I think if you use regular celery the recipe says that you need to peel the little celery strings off, which seems a little finnicky and irritating, but such is life. If the flavor of the final dish is a rough approximation of the flavor of the Chinese celery in this dish, I would make it again and again.
Recipe after the jump!
I have to admit - it is more than a little ridiculous that I am still posting Chinese New Year meals. It's almost June. But I started posting them back in March and promised to post another week's worth of Chinese New Year meals so we are committed. I'm sure I could stop doing it and no one would notice, but we're just going to keep slowly trucking along because that's what we do. We finally had time to visit Chinatown this past weekend for another few meals' worth of Asian groceries, so we should be making a few other Asian recipes this week (the goal is to knock off 2 belated Chinese New Year meals this week and they we will only have ONE left to do). Whoo-hoo! I refuse to let this carry on into June if I can help it... I want to make some seafood panfried noodles and another meat or tofu dish with Chinese celery (this Celery and Tofu recipe from the NY Times has been taunting me for years) and then I will call it a day for this year. The noodles might need to wait until next weekend, but I'm thinking the other dish is definitely do-able next week without another trip to the grocery store.
Anyway, these pork belly buns are one of my favorite pork belly dishes we have ever made. When we tried to make the Pork Belly Ssam with Mustard Seed Sauce from the Momofuku cookbook our pork belly was way salty and verging on burnt. Previously our most successful pork belly dish was this Red-Braised Pork Belly (Hong Shao Rou), which was lovely and very flavorful. But it was a little heavy and very rich. Even though the flavor was really good, you felt like you were eating a heart attack on a plate. This pork belly was super flavorful - savory and a little sweet with just a hint of lingering heat from the Thai chili (I highly recommend you include it). The cilantro gives the dish some freshness and crisp texture, the peanut powder is nicely sweet and crunchy and the pickled mustard greens are vinegary and tangy. It is the perfect balance of the fatty pork, tender steamed buns and a variety of flavors and textures.
Recipe after the jump!
There are a lot of things that I love about this recipe. The first is the asparagus itself. Fresh asparagus is one of the things I love most about spring. Charred in a pan with evoo, s&p, the asparagus was sweet but grassy. The second is how wonderful the creamy adobo sauce is. This is a sauce that I want to slather on all sorts of dishes - it is spicy, sweet and tangy. Actually, I think this sauce would work really nicely with skirt steak tacos. I told Alex that if we ever have people over for a Mexican fiesta I want to simply grill up some skirt steak for tacos and make these asparagus tacos. You can use all of the same fixings for both sets of tacos, whip up some homemade guacamole and some elote and it will be an amazing meal. Somehow you taste all of the various flavors here - the adobo sauce adds a ton of flavor without obscuring the flavor of the asparagus or the sweetness of the pickled onions. My two biggest complaints about the Smoky Chicken Tinga Tacos we made were that the flavor of the chipotles obscured everything else and the tacos didn't have any texture. All you tasted was heat and everything was soft. This dish had varying textures and serious depth of flavor. It was sweet, spicy, crunchy, creamy and tangy. In a nutshell, these tacos were delicious. And I will be adding them to my regular taco rotation. They were great with fresh asparagus, but with all of the other flavors and textures going on, normal supermarket asparagus would work too.
Recipe after the jump!
Hurray for fresh asparagus! Before I go on I should disclose that I bought about 3 lbs of fresh asparagus at the farmers' market this week (along with a LOT of other fresh produce, some of which we already used) and as of today we have only used about half of it. So you can expect a few more asparagus recipes shortly. We already made a much lazier version of this Spring Salad of Asparagus, Ramps, Snap Peas, and Peas, with Poached Egg and Lemon Vinaigrette and we are planning on making some asparagus tacos tomorrow. We will have to wait and see how much asparagus we have left after that, but I'm thinking it will be enough for at least one more dish.
I guess I should turn to this salad. I bought My Pizza by Jim Lahey roughly two years ago but we haven't had the opportunity to use it much. There are a ton of delicious looking pizzas in there (one of which I am considering for our remaining asparagus), but there are also some nice salads and other appetizers. For us it has become one of those cookbooks I always mean to use, but somehow never do. I need to fix that because this salad was one of the easiest and tastiest things we have made at home recently. The combination of asparagus, avocado, lime and mint isn't an intuitive one for me but it works really nicely. I was worried this salad would be a little too simple, but it works - it's really simple, but the avocado makes it creamy and a little indulgent and the fresh farmers' market asparagus has a lovely grassy sweetness. Our lime was a little stingy on the juice so I would recommend tasting and adding more lime juice to taste (or a little lime zest if your limes are similarly stingy). This is a dish I can definitely see us making in the future - it's perfect on days where you just don't want to turn on the stove and/or oven, but a mixed green salad doesn't work. It makes a really good side dish that could work with a number of entrees, but I can see myself serving it for brunch with a simple frittata or omelet and some fresh fruit. I don't think I would pair it with pasta, but it could also work nicely with some homemade pizza. I would probably do a simple pizza without too much cheese and meat - maybe a margherita or stracciatella pizza or a pizza with prosciutto and arugula. My Pizza also has a spinach pizza called a Popeye Pie that I would pair this with.
Recipe after the jump!
In mid-April I started thinking tacos and Cinco de Mayo. Mexican food screams warm weather to me and I have been dreaming about warm weather since about December... If only I had visited the farmers' market on Monday I would have made these charred asparagus tacos for Cinco de Mayo but I didn't have time to visit the farmers' market before today. Before today I hadn't been to the farmers market in 2 weeks so I was pretty excited when I went today and saw all of the fresh spring veggies. Thank goodness for spring! I was so sick of winter and so very excited for fresh asparagus. When sugar snaps finally make it to the farmers' market I will do a giant happy dance. Moving on. My other Cinco de Mayo alternative was to make carnitas (Smitten Kitchen posted a slight variation on Homesick Texan's carnitas recipe and it looks super simple and tasty and Bon Appetit has a Beer-Braised Carnitas recipe that I find intriguing), but because Cinco de Mayo fell on a Monday this year it wasn't going to happen. I don't know about you, but I am barely prepared enough on Monday to throw something together - roasting or braising pork shoulder for 2-4 hours (or cooking it all day a slow cooker) just isn't going to happen.
So I guess you can fairly say that this recipe was my backup. Alex occasionally orders chicken tacos but I don't think I ever do. Then again, I do like chicken enchiladas so I guess it's not all that different. But chicken generally seems like such a cop out to me. I decided to try out this recipe anyway because what did I have to lose? It sounded good and the pictures looked good. And to be honest, I didn't have anything else planned. I was looking for a little more depth of flavor - instead I mostly tasted the chipotles and adobo sauce. And once I topped the chicken with tomatillo salsa I mostly tasted heat. The tomatillo salsa added brightness and acidity, but I wish we had made an equally bright and spicy pineapple salsa or maybe a mango salsa instead. I think a little sweetness would have been a good counterpoint to the chicken tinga tacos and some textural contrast would have been a really welcome addition. With the salsa and the braised chicken you ended up with a mouthful of fairly wet and somewhat mushy taco. Pineapple would provide some texture, but adding jicama to any salsa would work too. If you do make these tacos, make sure to drain the chicken fairly well before putting it on the tortilla. Same goes for the salsa. Otherwise you end up with a pool of liquid in your taco, which leads to a rapidly disintegrating corn tortilla...
Recipe after the jump!
This is totally embarassing. Alex and I made this roast chicken back in February or March. And then I forgot to post it. I really thought it was up on the blog. And then I was looking today today at other recipes that I had bookmarked to try and came across the draft of this post. The recipe was on there, the picture was too (even though it's not a very good picture), but I never got around to adding any text. Fail.
Roast chicken is one of my favorite things if it is well done. And Peruvian roast chicken seems to be, on average, a lot better than your average roast chicken. I don't know how they season it traditionally but their rotisserie chicken is magical - even the white meat is juicy and flavorful. I also love that spicy green sauce you get at Peruvian restaurants to go with their roast chicken. It's pretty much the best thing in the world. So it's a little shocking that it took me this long to make it at home. In my defense - it turns out that there is a whole lot of mayo and sour cream in the sauce. I don't know why the addition of mayonnaise and sour cream to a sauce that I know will be spicy and delicious bothers me when I make it at home, but it throws me for a loop. However, I am going to have to get over it because this stuff was pretty delicious. It's creamier than what I usually get at the Peruvian restaurants that I go to, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It also doesn't taste quite the same, but for a homemade version (that we adapted from Serious Eats), this was close enough for government work. Ours had some pretty good kick so if you want your green sauce a little milder, leave out some of the jalapeno seeds.
Recipe after the jump!
Like most of the pictures we take of our food for the blog, this picture doesn't look very appetizing. Actually, this picture is worse than most because the sauce looks like a pool of blood so it makes the whole experience a little... gorier than usual. But notwithstanding how the sauce looks, it is damn good. It is the perfect balance of sweetness and tartness, but nice and rich. Adding the butter to the sauce at the very end made it glossy and rich. Reducing the pomegranate juice in the porky cast iron pan made the whole dish that much porkier and more flavorful. It also pairs really nicely with the spice rub on the outside of the pork, which isn't spicy but it does have a lot of flavor. I would love to make this dish for a more casual dinner party - it is easy to make but it is pretty distinctive and delicious. I think with bread, a nice salad and some veggies (roast brussels sprouts would be lovely) it would make a really nice meal that is elegant and flavorful, but not fussy. Tonight we served the pork with broccoli we roasted with jalapeno, shallots and garlic. Roasting broccoli is easily my favorite way to prepare it -it gets all nutty and crispy around the edges, but tender on the inside. Sauteed broccoli tends to be a little mushier and the flavors aren't as concentrated. The thinly sliced shallots were crispy and reminded me of onion straws or fried shallots - we usually mince or chop up our onions or shallots rather than tossing in thinly sliced rings but I will totally do the ring thing more often. I thought they added a really nice flavor and texture to the dish. It never would have occurred to me to add sliced jalapenos to the broccoli (that was all Alex), but they worked really nicely. The broccoli picked up a surprising amount of flavor and heat from the jalapenos, without being too spicy.
Recipes after the jump!
