Cardamom and Black Pepper Chicken

This chicken is delicious.  Super delicious.  And so was the cauliflower.  I know I usually babble on for awhile about how I chose the recipe, etc., but this time I just had to say something about how good the chicken was before I babbled.  Now on to the babbling.

The only Indian cookbook I have ever owned is by Madhur Jaffrey.  Several years ago when I first moved to NYC, I visited Kalustyans and asked the Indian ladies working there for a recommendation on a good Indian cookbook.  They pointed out Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey in a split second.  So I bought it.  And all of the recipes I have tried from it (with the exception of one) have been delicious.  So at the library the other day I saw another one of Madhur Jaffrey's cookbooks, From Curries to Kebabs: Recipes from the Indian Spice Trail so I checked it out.  And then proceeded to go through the cookbook, flagging all of the recipes I wanted to try.  This recipe for Cardamom and Black Pepper Chicken was one of the ones that first caught my eye.  And then I thought while I was at it, I should try one of the cauliflower recipes that had also caught my eye.  So our meal of Cardamom and Black Pepper Chicken with Quick Cauliflower Bhaji was born.  I also served it with plain basmati rice and naan (not homemade unfortunately).  Yum.  Both the chicken and the cauliflower had some spice to them, but not an overwhelming amount.  The heat level was lingering and meshed well with the various spices, cumin and coriander in particular.  In the case of the chicken, the spice was additionally balanced against the perfume of the cardamom, the sweetness of the cinnamon, and the tang of the fresh lemon juice.  Very tasty.  I considered making some cilantro chutney with the meal to give it some additional freshness and color, but decided against it.  In the future I might top the chicken with some roughly chopped cilantro because I just love cilantro and otherwise the meal is a study in beige, but it certainly didn't need it flavor-wise. 

Alex kept stopping mid-bite and saying how pleased he was with the meal.  You know it's good when your husband stopped eating long enough to compliment you and/or your food.  Several times.  What can I say?  I'm just that good.  Or Madhur Jaffrey is.

Recipes after the jump!

Linguine with Red Clam Sauce

Maybe pasta with red clam sauce isn't the classiest and most complicated of Italian dishes, but I have always had a thing for clam sauce - either white or red.  I actually prefer white clam sauce to red, but Alex requested pasta with red clam sauce this evening.  Then he dug up this recipe from Food & Wine, which I find mildly ironic after my post with the Carrot-Ginger soup where I blathered on for an entire paragraph about how we never make recipes from Food & Wine.  And here we are making a dish closely adapted from a Food & Wine recipe just a few days later.  Oh the irony.

This recipe isn't the best Linguine with Red Clam Sauce I have ever had, but it is easy and tasty.  It's also better than some restaurants' versions that I have tried.  All in all I would say this recipe is good, not great, but sometimes that is really what you are going for.  We changed the original recipe some to boost up the spice factor.  We also used one pound of fresh egg linguine, rather than using dried pasta.  In the future I might use dried pasta, rather than fresh, because it has more bite to it.  It's almost impossible to cook fresh pasta al dente, but some bite to the pasta would provide a nice textural contrast to the softness of the clams and stewed tomatoes.  I would probably also add some cockles to the pasta in addition to the canned clams, in order to increase the quantity of clams/cockles in the sauce and to give the sauce some variety.  After all, if canned clams make the sauce tasty, fresh cockles could only make it better.  Fresh cockles would obviously add another level of complexity to the dish, but a little complexity never hurt anyone. 

Recipe after the jump!

Cornbread with Caramelized Onions, Apples and Cheddar

I know that I have mentioned my love of Momofuku Milk Bar several times on this blog.  Their soft serve flavors are amazing (if a little weird at times), and their cornflake chocolate chip marshmallow cookies are absolutely out of this world.  Speaking of their soft serve flavors, right now they have cream cheese frosting soft serve.  It is delicious topped with their carrot cake crumble or the cornflake crunch.  Run, don't walk there, if you love cream cheese frosting because it's fantastic.  Anyway, along with their cookies and ice cream, they have daily bread specials that are quite good.  A few months ago I had their cornbread, which inspired me to create this recipe.  In the past I kept my cornbread quite simple - with fresh (or frozen) corn and some cheese thrown in for good measure.  Oh and scallions from time to time as well.  This is my first attempt at a really out there cornbread.  I can't take all of the credit since I got the idea from Milk Bar, but I think I deserve at least a little credit for coming up with a pretty delicious and interesting cornbread.

Because I love buttermilk in baked goods (it makes them so moist and faintly tangy), I made this a buttermilk cornbread recipe.  I also like my cornbread on the sweeter side but because I was already adding caramelized onions and sauteed apples, I didn't want to add any sugar.  Instead I threw in some honey.  While I thought about throwing in a teaspoon or two of fresh thyme, I decided against it in the end.  Maybe in the future I will experiment with thyme in the cornbread, but this time I really wanted to taste the interplay between the cheddar, the apples and the caramelized onions.  This definitely isn't your grandmother's cornbread - it is far too funky (in a good way) for that.  The best way I can think of to describe it is to say that it is deeply rich and savory.  And incredibly moist.  If that sounds appealing to you, then give it a try!

Recipe after the jump!

Carrot-Ginger Soup with Coconut Shrimp

Of the three traditional food magazines, Food & Wine was always my least favorite.  Then Gourmet was canceled last year, and I found myself turning to Food & Wine more.  This is one of the few recipes that we have actually made from Food & Wine.  Generally I turn to it for inspiration, but don't bother making the recipes.  I'm not really sure why that is, but I do tend to find the recipes from Food & Wine to be more complicated than those from Bon Appetit and Gourmet.  Granted, that's something of a gross generalization, but beyond that I'm not sure why I don't subscribe to Food & Wine like I did to Gourmet, or make more recipes from it.  Then again, I somehow ended up with a subscription to Everyday by Rachael Ray and even though I had all of the issues, I can't remember making a single recipe.  Nothing against the magazine, I just rarely found things that excited me enough to break out my knives and get cooking.

This recipe from Food & Wine is delightful.  Prior to making the soup tonight, we had made the coconut shrimp a few times.  If you're just making the coconut shrimp, I recommend adding some lime zest to the grated coconut and serving it with sweet chili dipping sauce.  It's delicious.  The original recipe doesn't specify whether to use sweetened or unsweetened grated coconut, but I like to mix the two.  If you use all sweetened coconut and serve it with the sweet chili dipping sauce it gets a little cloyingly sweet.  But if you mix the two coconuts it's perfect.  The shrimp are also delicious when served with this soup.  The soup is a little sweet from the carrots and the onions, with definite peanut butter undertones.  The addition of the milk and the coconut milk make the soup velvety smooth and creamy.  Both the soup and the coconut shrimp have a little heat to them from the crushed red pepper flakes and the cayenne pepper respectively.  I know that Alex and I like spicy more than some, but the hit of mild and creeping heat makes the soup for me.

Recipe after the jump!

Tuna Mac

When I was in college one of my roommates introduced me to the concept of tuna mac.  She would take canned tuna, mix it with mayo and various other things, and then mix it in with plain, cooked macaroni.  Gourmet food it was not, but when you're an 18 year old living in the dorms you make do with the limited resources you have.  Now tuna mac is not something I make often, nor do I make it in a form that resembles what my roommate used to make in the dorms back in the day, but every once in awhile when I have leftover tuna in the fridge I toss it with some freshly cooked pasta and veggies.  Or sometimes I top some baby spinach with it and make a salad, but that's for another day.  Today I took the leftover tuna mixed with homemade pesto from my tuna tartines, and mixed it with farro pasta, shredded radicchio leftover from the turkey parm burgers, and fresh basil.  I'm on this kick right now of trying to be better about reusing ingredients leftover from previous meals.  How often do you buy a batch of fresh basil for some recipe or another and then end up throwing half (or more) of it away later in the week because you forgot all about it?  I know it happens to me all of the time.  So this was an attempt on my part to clean out the fridge and be more environmentally (and budget) conscious by re-using ingredients!  Not only was my lunch healthy, it was tasty!  I loved the slight bitterness of the radicchio contrasted against the sweetness of the red onions and the nuttiness of the pasta.  And then the basil and tuna really brought it all together.  Suffice it to say that I'm rather proud of myself at the moment. 

Seeing as I am going to be wearing a bikini (and a wedding dress, but that's a long story that I won't get into here) on the beach in Aruba in two short months, I'm trying to cook more figure-friendly and/or health conscious than usual.  All things considered, I am a moderately healthy eater.  I try to get in my servings of fruits and vegetables, I don't drink a lot of soda or caffeine of any sort, and I try to limit my intake of both red meat and fried food.  I'm not psycho about it.  I love food way too much to deprive myself of a nice juicy burger and french fries, or a big slice of Carvel cake (a guilty pleasure) every once in awhile when I get a craving.  And I refuse to diet because that would take all of the fun out of eating and cooking.  Which would then take a lot of the fun out of life.  But I am trying to be a good little eater and eat whole grains instead of white, and bake instead of fry, as much as possible.  We will see if it was all worth it two months from now!

Recipe after the jump!

Six-Spice Hanger Steak Tacos with Pickled Onions

For the past year I feel like you couldn't turn around without hearing some reference to the Kogi taco truck and Asian-inspired tacos, quesadillas and hot dogs.  Most of the variations that I hear about are Korean, but I decided to whip up some Chinese-inspired tacos using hanger steak.  Part of this decision was based on our lunch today at Umi Nom out in Brooklyn where we had some seriously delicious Filipino or more generally Asian-inspired dishes.  Actually, one of the dishes we had today, the crispy chicken wings, seemed like a good variation on one of my favorite dishes, butter-fried frog legs, served at Huong Viet, a Vietnamese restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia.  The main difference (aside from the fact that these were chicken wings and the others are truly frog legs) was that at Umi Nom the chicken wings were made using tempura batter, rather than a more standard batter for deep frying, so the coating was shatteringly crisp.  So delicious.  The bahay kubo fried rice with chicken, shrimp, and Chinese sausage was similarly delicious.  What a great restaurant.  Too bad it's all the way out in Clinton Hill.  After such an amazing lunch I couldn't decide whether making another Asian-inspired dish was a good idea since I was worried that anything Asian we made couldn't possibly compare to our lunch.  And in some ways I was right because I am no professional chef, but these tacos were truly delicious.

This recipe is a play off a hanger steak recipe that I featured in My favorite recipes of 2009 post.  Generally speaking, you have to be somewhat wary of Sichuan peppercorns in any recipe because they can be somewhat overpowering.  And our current batch of peppercorns is far more pungent than our last batch, so I had to seriously dial down the amount of Sichuan peppercorns in the recipe here.  Otherwise you would quickly learn why the Sichuan peppercorns are sometimes referred to as "numbing" - after an overdose of Sichuan peppercorns your entire mouth tingles and then eventually go numb.  It's definitely a peculiar and not altogether pleasant sensation.  When all of the ingredients in this spice rub are in proper balance, it results in a very flavorful piece of steak.  When served with my pickled onions, fresh cilantro, a squirt of fresh lime juice, and sliced avocado it results in a very delicious and unusual taco.  The creaminess of the avocado is the perfect foil for the six-spice seasoning.  It gives the dish some richness and fat to balance out the fairly assertive flavors of the six-spice.  The sweet, yet savory pickled onions (based off a recipe by David Leibovitz) add another fantastic level of flavor.  Those onions are seriously amazing.  I definitely recommend making them, if nothing else.  They would be delicious on top of almost any sandwich, or served alongside all sorts of other dishes.  On top of everything else, the fresh flavors of the lime juice and the cilantro brightens the entire dish.  Every bite of the tacos sings.  There are levels upon levels of flavor that play off one another.  Now maybe these tacos weren't as well-executed, or as fancy, as the dishes we enjoyed today at Umi Nom, but they sure were delicious. 

Recipe after the jump!

Sausages with White Beans in Tomato Sauce

I have to admit that I am very pleased with this series of recipes.  Somehow it all came together with very little effort from me.  I had everything I needed for every single recipe, with the exception of fresh bread (which you really need to purchase fresh every time if you really want to do things the right way) and some produce.  If the squid salad was nice and summery and light - perfect for a meal on a warm spring or summer day, these sausages were perfect for a cool spring, fall or winter meal.  Luckily, the beginning of this week was nice and warm and it got cooler and damper as the week went on.  So somehow the recipes even ended up matching with the weather.

I have never been much of a bean eater.  I have friends (who will remain nameless), who can eat black beans straight out of a can.  I am so not into beans like that.  Truth be told, the only beans I actually like are white beans and I only like them some of the time.  This dish was a perfect white bean dish for me.  It was hearty and rich, not to mention flavorful, but it didn't tip over into the overly starchy, heavy realm of bean dishes that I really dislike.  And the beans retained some of their bite so they didn't dissolve into mush in your mouth, which is another tendency of beans that I really dislike.  Instead, this recipe had wonderfully savory chunks of Italian sausage stewed in a mixture of San Marzano tomatoes and hearty white beans.  While not a show-stopping 4 star dish, it was tasty and filling.  Not only that, it was remarkably easy and quick to prepare (once you have the white beans made that is).  Come next fall I will definitely be adding this dish to the regular rotation.  I can make the white beans over the weekend and then for an easy weeknight meal just throw them in there with the sausages, sage and tomatoes.  On a busy night in the middle of the work week, that's my kind of meal - beans and all.

Recipe after the jump!