Well, it looks like I've managed to survive (most of) another Southern summer without melting and/or complaining incessantly. I think I was better than ever about resisting the urge to use the oven, dishwasher, and any other heat sources in the kitchen as freely as I do when temperatures are more moderate. That and a list of summer meal ideas (which I didn't actually consult much; merely making it was some sort of psychological boost) helped a lot. But having had a taste of cool mornings lately, I am more restless than ever to start using my oven for middle-of-the-day baking projects and slow-cooked meats; I have always intensely looked forward to fall for many reasons, and as I cook more the anticipation grows each year. Spring and summer certainly have their culinary delights, but for me, primarily a baker, the prospect of cooler weather leading up to the best of all holidays (Thanksgiving, closely followed of course by Christmas) is more tantalizing than anything.
I started making a top ten list in my head of the dishes I will be making as soon as it cools down. They are:
1. Pork vindaloo (from Best International Recipe; review here). My Indian repertoire currently consists of this stew and a delicious recipe for coconut milk-braised green beans, so I can't speak to authenticity or anything, but just as a stew it is fantastic.
2. Spiced carrot soup (adapted from Cafe Bouloud, as printed in CI's Restaurant Favorites at Home). I've rarely made a soup with such complex flavors--the finish with fresh carrot juice is brilliant--and the smell of the carrots braising in coconut milk and curry powder is out of this world. The original recipe calls for shrimp, and it does work well, but I often just make it plain and serve with a hearty, interesting salad and bread.
3. Spanish-style pork loin with sherry-raisin vinaigrette. This was a seriously good pork roast and I wrote about it here.
4. Chicken in a pot (much more elegantly known by its French name, poulet en cocotte). I tried this once last year out of BIR, and it was quite good, though it took much longer to finish than indicated and that always gets me flustered. It was still, as promised, a very low-fuss way of evenly cooking a whole chicken while keeping it moist, and it tasted very French and refined. And wintry.
5. Any big old cheesy pasta casserole that takes two hours to bake--any at all. Pastitsio in particular. (Another nice thing about cooler weather is that my motivation to exercise is ten times what it is in the summer, which is good because pastitsio will make even me feel compelled to schedule an extra few minutes into my next workout. And I am not a calorie-counter.)
6. Thai chicken soup (tom kha gai), also from BIR. The lemongrass, the coconut milk, the sweat-inducing spice from the chiles and curry paste...I could eat this stuff every day.
7. Sweet potatoes: baked, in soups, in pies, anything. There's a mashed sweet potatoes with vanilla recipe in Restaurant Favorites that I also need to try. Cream, vanilla, butter, and the best vegetable ever. How could that go wrong?
8. Chowder. Specifically corn (with generous amounts of bacon) and clam. I was fairly addicted to this clam chowder last year.
9. Simple, one-dish meat and potato meals you stick in the oven and forget about, like this one. That was a good recipe. Also, braised beef with polenta and crusty bread. Lucky you, the beef recipe is on Google Books here.
10. A hundred variations on grilled cheese and only one (the best) cream of tomato soup. CI's 30-minute tomato soup, to be exact. I've tried their standard (more time-consuming) soup, too, and I think it has nothing on the quick one. I must have made this soup 100 times last year and never got the slightest bit sick of it. Below is my adaptation of the recipe.
Cream of Tomato Soup
adapted from Cook's Illustrated, Best 30-Minute Recipe
3 (14.5 oz) cans diced tomatoes
3 c. Swanson low-sodium or homemade chicken broth, plus maybe a little more
2 bay leaves
2 Tbsp. butter
1 onion, minced
1 Tbsp. brown sugar
1 Tbsp. tomato paste
2 Tbsp. flour
1/3 c. heavy cream
2 tsp. dry sherry
1. Put the tomatoes one can at a time into a strainer set over a large bowl. Squeeze out as much juice as you can: ideally you'll get 2 cups after all the cans are strained. Add broth to equal 5 cups of liquid. Bring the broth /juice mixture with the bay leaves to a boil in a medium saucepan, then cover and keep warm.
2. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a large pot or Dutch oven over high heat. Add the drained tomatoes, onion, brown sugar, tomato paste, and 1/2 tsp. salt. Cook, stirring frequently, until the tomatoes look dry and are beginning to brown, 10-12 minutes. Stir in the flour and cook for 1 minute.
3. Slowly whisk or stir in the hot broth mixture. Bring to a simmer and cook for 5 minutes to blend flavors.
4. Remove the bay leaves, then puree the soup in batches in a blender. (With hot liquids it's best to remove the little plastic cap inside the lid, and cover the hole with a thickly folded dish towel under your hand.) Return pureed soup to the pot and stir in the cream and sherry. Bring it just to a simmer, then remove from heat, season with salt and cayenne pepper to taste, and serve. (Yield: 6 servings. If you want to make this a day or two ahead, don't add the cream and sherry until you reheat it before serving.)
Showing posts with label Restaurant Favorites. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Restaurant Favorites. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Black-eyed pea cakes: a belated review
A couple weeks ago I finally got around to making this delicious vegetarian take on black-eyed pea cakes from Restaurant Favorites at Home. This book is one installment in the Cook's Illustrated Best Recipe "series," if a line of cookbooks can be called such. Since I gather from fruitless Google searches that it is not widely reviewed online (probably because it was published in 2003, right around when blogs were gaining ground as a high school "fad," and further because it seems to have gone out of print since then), I want to try to review everything I make from it on this blog.
Since it was just two of us for lunch, I halved both components of this recipe (said to serve 6). I had tons of sauce leftover, and especially for lunch portions, 3 cakes each (which comes out to be the serving size) was a bit too much. I wouldn't call these dainty little things. Especially relevant for entertaining, you have the option of making the cakes ahead, up to the frying---ironically an overnight rest was deleted from the original restaurant recipe because of the challenges that planning ahead could pose for the home cook. I made the cakes the night before (which means you have to soak the black-eyed peas the night before that) and brought them most of the way to room temperature before frying, just to be safe. I wouldn't make the sauce ahead, as I thought the texture suffered quite a bit the next day(s). (Did I mention I had a lot left over?!)
My one major problem with the outcome was that while dipping them in the panko before frying, several of the cakes "crumbled" a bit, and a couple completely fell apart, making them un-fryable. But that was almost certainly due to the fact that I could not properly puree part of the beans (lacking a food processor), as the recipe tells you to do presumably to help them bind better. So I don't think that's a recipe problem: just be sure not to skip the puree.
The sauce was very quick and easy, and pretty tasty. There's something so restaurant-esque to me about making a sauce that begins with a bunch of chopped stuff on the stovetop and ends in a smooth puree in the blender... Anyway, for me this sauce wouldn't be spicy unless you added a good deal more Tabasco. (I would want to try it now with the chipotle Tabasco I opened up the other night, which I found fairly addictive.)
The only pictures I took of the leftover cakes (which I put back in the fridge until frying the next day) were terribly out of focus and not worth posting. Overall I'd give this recipe a 6/10. Perfectly decent flavor, not too fussy, and a nice option for a Southern vegetarian (rare combination!) lunch or main course.
Since it was just two of us for lunch, I halved both components of this recipe (said to serve 6). I had tons of sauce leftover, and especially for lunch portions, 3 cakes each (which comes out to be the serving size) was a bit too much. I wouldn't call these dainty little things. Especially relevant for entertaining, you have the option of making the cakes ahead, up to the frying---ironically an overnight rest was deleted from the original restaurant recipe because of the challenges that planning ahead could pose for the home cook. I made the cakes the night before (which means you have to soak the black-eyed peas the night before that) and brought them most of the way to room temperature before frying, just to be safe. I wouldn't make the sauce ahead, as I thought the texture suffered quite a bit the next day(s). (Did I mention I had a lot left over?!)
My one major problem with the outcome was that while dipping them in the panko before frying, several of the cakes "crumbled" a bit, and a couple completely fell apart, making them un-fryable. But that was almost certainly due to the fact that I could not properly puree part of the beans (lacking a food processor), as the recipe tells you to do presumably to help them bind better. So I don't think that's a recipe problem: just be sure not to skip the puree.
Sauce in the making: looks like Christmas!
The sauce was very quick and easy, and pretty tasty. There's something so restaurant-esque to me about making a sauce that begins with a bunch of chopped stuff on the stovetop and ends in a smooth puree in the blender... Anyway, for me this sauce wouldn't be spicy unless you added a good deal more Tabasco. (I would want to try it now with the chipotle Tabasco I opened up the other night, which I found fairly addictive.)
The only pictures I took of the leftover cakes (which I put back in the fridge until frying the next day) were terribly out of focus and not worth posting. Overall I'd give this recipe a 6/10. Perfectly decent flavor, not too fussy, and a nice option for a Southern vegetarian (rare combination!) lunch or main course.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Traditional Andalusian gazpacho
I made the trek this morning to the awe-inspiring Dunwoody Farmers' Market, where I got some lovely, sweet cucumbers and a couple kinds of tomatoes from two different vendors. The tiny multi-colored heirlooms will go into pasta caprese later in the week, and the "regular" (I guess plum?) ones, which were very ripe, made me switch my meal plan around so that I could make gazpacho today.
Contrary to appearances, I don't actually love Spanish food; for one thing, I haven't cooked or eaten enough of it to judge, and for another, olives are one of the few foods I simply cannot eat in any form (except the oil), and they seem to show up in a lot of Spanish dishes. A couple summers ago, I tried making gazpacho, a Cook's Illustrated recipe (as with many popular dishes they have several versions, and I can't recall which I tried), and it was disappointing. I just didn't like the flavor or texture. I wanted to try again, knowing that there can be a wide range of gazpacho styles, so this time I turned to the Andalusian recipe in the first chapter of CI's Restaurant Favorites (it is adapted from Jaleo in D.C., where the famous José Andrés is chef).
The soup is nothing more than a slice of bread for thickener, garlic (which I just realized I forgot!), tomatoes, bell peppers (it called for green, I used yellow), cucumbers, sherry vinegar, and olive oil, pureed with enough water to make it the right consistency, then strained. I do not have a medium-mesh strainer as called for, so I tried to approximate what that would produce by using my fine-mesh strainer and adding back into the soup about half of the solids. The "garnish," which is much more substantial than I am accustomed to associating with the term, simply reprised the vegetables in small dice along with fresh garlic croutons. It was a great soup, and I'd make it again exactly as I did tonight, but I'm glad I cut back the yield to 2 servings so there were no leftovers. It's the sort of thing we wouldn't really crave, but once it's on the table, it seems right and tastes delicious. I served it with our old friend the "Spanish" tortilla, fully Americanized with Frank's sauce because I didn't feel like making Romesco, and ciabatta toasts with Manchego cheese. Which is one Spanish food I really am starting to like.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Results and photos
Here's a rundown of our little anniversary dinner, with award winning photojournalism:
I survived, with one minor battle scar where I stupidly grabbed the end of the thermometer that had been hanging out in 350 degree oil, another round of deep frying---this time for chicken dumplings, a mix of dark chicken meat and aromatics enveloped in wonton wrappers, which are then coated in egg, then panko. They were quite tasty with the sweet-and-sour sauce, which had that nice light red, almost translucent look just like the little cup they put in your Chinese takeout. It was very easy to make (red pepper, garlic, red wine vinegar, honey, sugar, red pepper flakes, etc.)
The tuna was very good, though I next time I would salt the meat before cooking, and save a couple of the ingredients (namely cilantro and scallions) to add off heat after the sauce is done, so that their flavor is more vibrant. Shiitakes are offically my favorite mushroom. Slicing them was a bit like slicing marshmallows, but needless to say they tasted much better. Unfortunately the color scheme was unpleasantly monochromatic.
And finally, the poached pear dessert: I could have just eaten the marvelous ginger pastry cream and been happy, but all together the flavors were exotic and interesting. Not something I'd want every day, but that's okay because this would be prohibitively labor-intensive. I was very pleased with how the spicy shortbread "chopsticks" came out, and relieved at how easy the dough was to roll out. These would probably be great with any Asian-themed ice cream or sorbet. The pears mysteriously firmed up quite a bit while they rested in the fridge, though they had been pretty tender before, so that was a little sad. But it was a success all in all.
I survived, with one minor battle scar where I stupidly grabbed the end of the thermometer that had been hanging out in 350 degree oil, another round of deep frying---this time for chicken dumplings, a mix of dark chicken meat and aromatics enveloped in wonton wrappers, which are then coated in egg, then panko. They were quite tasty with the sweet-and-sour sauce, which had that nice light red, almost translucent look just like the little cup they put in your Chinese takeout. It was very easy to make (red pepper, garlic, red wine vinegar, honey, sugar, red pepper flakes, etc.)
The tuna was very good, though I next time I would salt the meat before cooking, and save a couple of the ingredients (namely cilantro and scallions) to add off heat after the sauce is done, so that their flavor is more vibrant. Shiitakes are offically my favorite mushroom. Slicing them was a bit like slicing marshmallows, but needless to say they tasted much better. Unfortunately the color scheme was unpleasantly monochromatic.
And finally, the poached pear dessert: I could have just eaten the marvelous ginger pastry cream and been happy, but all together the flavors were exotic and interesting. Not something I'd want every day, but that's okay because this would be prohibitively labor-intensive. I was very pleased with how the spicy shortbread "chopsticks" came out, and relieved at how easy the dough was to roll out. These would probably be great with any Asian-themed ice cream or sorbet. The pears mysteriously firmed up quite a bit while they rested in the fridge, though they had been pretty tender before, so that was a little sad. But it was a success all in all.
I love star anise.
Anniversary Dinner
Today's our anniversary, and in an unusual fit of ambition fueled most likely by self-deception, I am trying three new recipes---unless you count each component, in which case it's six new recipes---for one dinner. Thankfully, more than half of them are at least partially make-ahead, which helps tremendously. Two are from CI's Restaurant Favorites, and one is from Epicurious, which I bookmarked a while back thanks to a thread on Chowhound where at least 5 people in a row named that as one of their top 5 favorite recipes of all time. So, it's about time we tried it.
Appetizer: Crispy chicken dumplings with sweet-and-sour sauce. These are deep fried with a homemade sauce. I therefore trust that they will be good. I don't currently have a food processor so I'm not looking forward to mincing everything in the filling rather than having a machine whiz it around for 10 seconds, but I'll deal.
Main: Pan-seared tuna steaks with ginger-shiitake cream sauce. I don't think I've ever bought fresh tuna or shiitakes before. When I stopped by Fresh Market this morning I was pleasantly surprised that a) the few shiitakes they had left were on sale, and without weighing I picked out the last ones that looked good and had exactly enough for my recipe; and b) the sashimi-grade tuna was only $11/lb, which I wasn't expecting. I'll serve this over soba noodles.
Dessert: Asian poached pears with ginger pastry cream and spicy shortbread chopsticks. I have to say that it costs me something to make a dessert that does not contain chocolate in any of its parts, but I thought I should give Mike a break from my obsession already. Besides, this recipe looks really intriguing. I already made the delicious pastry cream last week (sans the ginger) for my cream puffs, so it's technically not new. I made the version with ginger this morning, and now I am waiting for the pears and poaching liquid to cool down before I run out for an errand. They smell delicious. I didn't splurge on Asian pears, as CI promised that regular grocery store hard-as-a-rock pears work great. It took mine a while longer than estimated to become tender, but I think the liquid wasn't quite simmering when I put the pears in. You would think by now I'd be fairly confident as to what simmering liquid looks like, but it's not the first time it's happened. Probably more a function of impatience than incompetence. The chopsticks look a bit daunting, but I think they'll add a nice textual and visual contrast.
Appetizer: Crispy chicken dumplings with sweet-and-sour sauce. These are deep fried with a homemade sauce. I therefore trust that they will be good. I don't currently have a food processor so I'm not looking forward to mincing everything in the filling rather than having a machine whiz it around for 10 seconds, but I'll deal.
Main: Pan-seared tuna steaks with ginger-shiitake cream sauce. I don't think I've ever bought fresh tuna or shiitakes before. When I stopped by Fresh Market this morning I was pleasantly surprised that a) the few shiitakes they had left were on sale, and without weighing I picked out the last ones that looked good and had exactly enough for my recipe; and b) the sashimi-grade tuna was only $11/lb, which I wasn't expecting. I'll serve this over soba noodles.
Dessert: Asian poached pears with ginger pastry cream and spicy shortbread chopsticks. I have to say that it costs me something to make a dessert that does not contain chocolate in any of its parts, but I thought I should give Mike a break from my obsession already. Besides, this recipe looks really intriguing. I already made the delicious pastry cream last week (sans the ginger) for my cream puffs, so it's technically not new. I made the version with ginger this morning, and now I am waiting for the pears and poaching liquid to cool down before I run out for an errand. They smell delicious. I didn't splurge on Asian pears, as CI promised that regular grocery store hard-as-a-rock pears work great. It took mine a while longer than estimated to become tender, but I think the liquid wasn't quite simmering when I put the pears in. You would think by now I'd be fairly confident as to what simmering liquid looks like, but it's not the first time it's happened. Probably more a function of impatience than incompetence. The chopsticks look a bit daunting, but I think they'll add a nice textual and visual contrast.
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