Miso-Marinated Chicken Breasts and Roasted Japanese Sweet Potatoes with Scallion Butter

For the record, Alex rocks.  Sometimes my job explodes and I basically disappear.  I would say that it's like magic, only the use of the word "magic" makes it sound fun and exciting when it is often exhausting for both of us.  Last Sunday he did the laundry, made us both dinner and cleaned up after dinner while I was on an epic conference call for work from 6:00 pm to nearly midnight.  And that's after I basically worked all evening on Saturday as well.  He also made me this Red Cabbage Salad with Warm Pancetta-Balsamic Dressing for lunch.  I picked out all of the recipes and bought most of the ingredients, but he handled everything else and there is a lot to be said for a meal magically appearing in front of me while I tap away at my laptop.  It's pretty awesome.  This meal started with the Japanese sweet potatoes that I picked up at a little Japanese deli near my office.  Once I had the sweet potatoes I needed to figure out what to do with them.  This sweet potato recipe seemed like a perfectly simple recipe to feature the Japanese sweet potatoes but not drown them in sugar and other stuff.  And the chicken naturally followed.  If we were making a miso-scallion butter for the sweet potatoes, why not marinate the chicken breasts in miso and aromatics? 

In some ways this dish was exactly what I needed to get me through that conference call.  It was warm, conforting and had good flavor.  It was also easy to eat one-handed (and relatively easy for Alex to prepare on his own).  I really liked the combination of miso-scallion butter with the sweet potatoes.  The delicate sweetness of the sweet potatoes worked really nicely with the savory butter.  I was surprised by how the texture of the sweet potatoes differed from the American sweet potatoes that I am used to.  The flesh was a little drier and starchier (which required more butter than I typically use with sweet potatoes).  I also liked the marinade for the chicken and was pleasantly surprised by how much flavor the chicken picked up.  I could imagine using these chicken breasts in a number of dishes.  They would be delicious either in a salad or a sandwich.  They were also quite nice as a stand alone entree.  They didn't have any noticable heat to them, but I was ok with that.  I think that the addition of more Korean red pepper flakes would have detracted from the overall comforting quality of the dish.  And after hour 3 of my conference call I was dying for some comfort.

Recipes after the jump!

Roast Corn with Spicy Miso Butter

I was pretty shocked to see fresh ears of corn still at the farmers' market this past weekend, but I bought a few on the off chance that they were still good.  Given that I wasn't sure how fresh and sweet the corn would be I thought it would be good to both cook it and slather it in some source of sauce.  I settled on this spicy miso butter because I thought it looked significantly different from anything we had made with corn in the past.  I also thought it would be fun to pair a savory and spicy butter with the roasted sweet corn.  Turns out that despite my skepticism, the corn was pretty sweet.  I actually asked Alex if there was any sugar in the miso butter.  While this recipe works really nicely with fresh sweet corn from the farmers' market, the miso butter packs enough of a punch that you could totally use it on out of season corn.  For a quasi-Asian barbeque I think this would make an excellent side.  The one thing I will note is that the miso butter was nowhere near as spicy as I had thought it would be given the amount of Sriracha and cayenne in it.  It was actually very mellow.  But delicious.

Recipe after the jump!

Roasted Wild Mushrooms with Miso Butter

We originally whipped up this miso butter so we could make the Pan-Roasted Asparagus, Poached Egg & Miso Butter from the Momofuku cookbook.  Then we realized our asparagus wasn't good.  Ugh.  I really hate it when that happens.  So I dug through the fridge for an alternative and came across some wild mushrooms - oyster mushrooms, enoki mushrooms and shiitakes.  I decided to go ahead and roast the mushrooms and serve them on a pool/bed of the miso butter.  I thought that the flavor of the miso butter went really well with the mushrooms.  Roasted mushrooms are a bit nutty and so is the miso butter.  The richness of the miso butter could get a little overwhelming, but the sherry that you cut the miso butter with gives it a nice punch and cut through the hearty flavors of the miso butter and the mushrooms wonderfully.  Given how well this turned out on the fly, I wonder what else the miso butter works with?

Recipe after the jump!

Tofu Dengaku (Broiled Tofu with Miso)

What do you do when it's 8:00 pm and you realize that your dinner that you were in the midst of making is going to take another 2 hours?  Well if it's the weekend and you're Alex and I you probably have a snack and stick with it.  But if it's mid-week, you scramble for something else that cooks up in 30 minutes or less.  In this case, you go ahead and broil up some tofu smeared with miso paste.  We have made a similar recipe before with eggplant, but I have been holding onto this recipe for an occasion like last night where you need to whip something up in a hurry for some time.  And man does this cook up in a hurry.  Miso packs such a punch that a little goes a long way - the tofu doesn't require any salt (or additional seasoning) whatsoever.  I think Alex liked the dish a little more than I did, but he generally likes miso more than I do.  For the record, it's not that I disliked the dish in anyway, it's just that I had my heart set on something else and somehow this didn't quite satisfy in comparison.  I also tend to find almost straight up miso a little overwhelming at times.  But no complaints here.  The dish was very quick, super easy and fairly tasty.  What more can you ask for?

Recipe after the jump!

Miso-Roasted Chicken with Miso Pan Gravy and Edamame with Shichimi Togarashi

I have been trying out new recipes for roast chicken for years.  Some are really successful, others less so.  But almost all of them are variations on the same theme - American flavors, some herbs, some garlic.  You get the picture.  Tonight for dinner I wanted to try something new out and make an Asian-inspired roast chicken recipe.  So we started discussing options and somehow I came up with the idea of making miso-marinated or rubbed chicken.  I love the idea of a marinade, but when you marinate your chicken the skin never quite crisps up as much as I want it to, unless you pat it really dry or allow it to air dry in the fridge.  Plus marinating requires time and time was something we didn't have - by the time we got home from the grocery store it was already after 7 pm.  So we decided to make some miso butter (like in David Chang's Pan-Roasted Asparagus, Poached Egg & Miso Butter), and rub it under the skin of the chicken breasts before roasting them.  I have rubbed various compound butters under the skin of turkeys on Thanksgiving, but I have never tried it with chicken breasts.  So we stuffed our chicken breasts with miso butter and then cooked it up using our go to roast chicken breast recipe, only we bumped up the heat a little because these chicken breasts were massive and with the layer of butter we thought it could cook at a slightly higher temperature.  We took some inspiration from this recipe from Food & Wine for the gravy and just kind of made things up as we went along.  As a random side dish, I took some inspiration from my newest cookbook, Cooking in the Moment by Andrea Reusing, and tossed some cooked edamame with some shichimi togarashi for a really easy (and tasty) side.

The chicken was juicy and tasty (those were the adjectives Alex came up with to describe it).  I was thinking more along the lines of savory, warm and hearty - the type of dish that you would love to eat on a cold evening.  Miso has such an interesting and unique flavor that really permeates the chicken while the butter keeps the chicken very moist.  The flavor profile here was very distinct from all of the other roast chicken recipes we have tried over the years, which was great.  And the skin crisps up very well, which is something that both Alex and I love.  If you aren't a huge fan of the flavor of miso, you can adjust the ratio of butter to miso accordingly, but since I really enjoy the flavor of white miso we kept the ratio about 50-50.  I think this would make a really good recipe for a whole roast chicken.  You could stuff the miso butter under the skin on the breasts and thighs and then roast until done.  I might even stuff the cavity with a little more miso butter, or just some shallots and herbs. 

Recipes after the jump!

Pan-Roasted Asparagus, Poached Egg & Miso Butter

This dish was one of the reasons I bought this cookbook.  Actually, we would have bought the cookbook either way because Alex and I both love the Momofuku restaurants, but when I saw this recipe in there I was really excited.  One of my first few meals at Momofuku Ssam was centered around this dish.  Of everything I ate that night, this was the dish that really stuck out in my mind.  Years later I still remembered how delicious it was.  And unlike most of the recipes in the Momofuku cookbook, the dish is actually fairly easy to put together.  It requires a few pans and utensils, but overall it's pretty simple!  And it's super delicious.  Alex is out of town for the evening so when I stumbled across fresh NJ asparagus at Whole Foods today, I knew exactly what I wanted to make for dinner.  It was every bit as delicious as I remembered, even if I had to modify the recipe to make regular poached eggs rather than the slow-poached eggs David Chang uses.  The miso-butter is warm and a little nutty.  It's totally savory and delicious.  Then when the runny egg yolk runs down into the butter, it forms this rich creamy sauce - almost like a hollandaise.  It's the perfect taste of spring.

Recipe after the jump!

Asian Winter Slaw

Our Japanese-Style Hamburgers demanded a vegetable side, with some crispy/crunchy texture to contrast with the tenderness of the hamburgers.  I have been considering making this recipe for Asian Winter Slaw ever since I happened across a bag of broccoli slaw at Trader Joe's.  Have I mentioned recently how much I love that place?  Anyway, the slaw seemed like the perfect accompaniment to the burgers so we went ahead and threw it together today.  It's light and crunchy, and the flavor of the white miso in the dressing is really nice.  It has never occurred to me to make an Asian-inspired slaw using miso paste, nor did it ever cross my mind that you could make a broccoli slaw.  That is partially due to the fact that I don't typically like coleslaw all that much, although I do make an exception for good Asian versions of coleslaw.  I thought that the very crunchy texture of the broccoli slaw was perfect with the burgers.  A more traditional cabbage slaw just wouldn't have provided enough textural contrast.

Recipe after the jump!

Cabbage with Miso

Cabbage is not one of my favorite things.  I'm just never quite sure what to do with it and up until this summer, I can't recall cooking cabbage more than once in an entire year.  About once a year I cook up a batch of sauerkraut, or put together some sort of slaw.  But with our CSA we have ended up with head after head of cabbage and it has taken some serious thought to come up with recipes using cabbage that don't remind me of (for lack of a better term) nursing home food.  I originally thought about making tofu to go with our soba noodles, but then decided that I would rather use up another CSA vegetable and leave the tofu for another day.  Once I settled on either cucumbers or cabbage I went and looked in Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking and found this recipe.  The cabbage we had was a green cabbage that was rather conical in shape.  If I were more familiar with cabbage I might be able to say exactly what variety of cabbage it is, but all I know is that it was a type of green cabbage - not savoy and not napa.

This dish was fine.  It wasn't amazing, but it wasn't bad either.  We ate the entire bowl so it obviously wasn't bad.  The dressing was very thick and savory, but all about the miso.  Alex and I both thought that the recipe was missing something - the balance was somehow off and it was really one-note.  But what do you expect with a big bowl of cabbage?

Recipe after the jump!