Asparagus

It happens every time - I eat a bunch of asparagus and then an hour later I think "what is that smell?"

Happy 6 months!

You are awesome!

Tilapia Tacos

We must be on a roll over here, cooking at home and making fun and fresh meals to boot.

Tonight, we made a new (to us) version of fish tacos. We cut up some tomatoes, onion, and cilantro, and added a splash of lime for some pico de gallo, and I blended up some more cilantro, with a good bit of garlic, salt, and some olive oil to make a sauce.

 We also sliced some fresh avocado and limes for additional layers of topping and depth of flavor.

The tilapia I seasoned with salt, pepper, and chili powder and browned in my cast iron pan (just a very little bit of olive oil in the pan), cooking for about 6 minutes total.

 The Fresh Market had some nice looking taco-sized tortillas in both yellow and white corn varieties, so I got some of both.

 The tacos came together well, and while a little messy to eat, I would definitely serve this meal to friends and family.  Between bites we discussed how some jalapenos or other spicy addition might be welcome for some.

I really like cooking at home when it works out this well.

Caprese and calamari

Tonight's fare may win the approval of our food friend Jeni Lee, or at least half of the dishes. 

I got some nice heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil for a nice caprese salad (finished with a little olive oil and pepper).

 To make this a meal, I also hand breaded and fried some calamari, dredged in some flour with paprika, chili powder, and garlic powder. Out of the oil, I added a little sea salt and ground pepper.

This was a great dinner, and fresh.

gas grill paella

A few years ago my sister and  traveled to Spain for the wedding of a friend.  She was married in a royal palace outside of Madrid, and it was beautiful as all weddings must be.  But for me, the real joy of the trip was seeing Madrid in the hands of a native.

We ate tapas at the best bars, and we dined with both our host family at their home and out at the most examplar restaurants they knew.  For one such dinner, we went out to a place famous for paella, and we dined in an inner courtyard under the open sky on paella and wine and friendly joy, and it was awesome.

Since that dinner I have thought of paella often and with strong feeling.  For the Christmas dinner we hosted this year, paella-style rice was one of our complementary courses.  Emboldened by that relative success, we thought this evening of doing a full-on paella for dinner, unburdened by guests and their tastes.

We elected to use the gas grill on the back deck, and we started with heating some olive oil in a paella pan.  When sufficiently hot, we added some raw (fresh, tail and shell on) shrimp and spanish-style chorizo.  Chorizo is awesome, and vegetarian should acknowledge it. 

After the shrimp were all pink and happy, we removed them to a bowl grill-side, and tossed in some chopped onions to simmer in the olive oil.  This took some time, which allowed for a refill on the homemade margaritas.  If you do not know how to make homemade margaritas, I weep for you.

Somewhere in the midst of cooking down the onions I added some salt, pepper, and paprika.  The hard core recipes call for Spanish style pimenton - you don't have that in your pantry, so use paprika.

This is the shrimp and chorizo, all cooked/warmed up, hanging out in a bowl by the grill waiting to be reintroduced to the juicy rice.

And speaking of, after the onions have softened a bit and begun to color, I added the rice, a can of diced tomatoes, and enough chicken stock to cover the rice.  At this point, the heat should be high enough to make the oil/rice/tomato mix bubble.

After 20 minutes or so, the liquid should have mostly bubbled away.  The secret of authentic paella is that rice should actually burn a little bit on the bottom - the crusty rice, soaked in shrimp juice, onion flavor, and chicken stock is super tasty.  Oh, and I forgot, we added some peas to the pan with the shrimp, etc.

We served the paella on the table in the pan, along with some sliced crusty bread.

It was awesome.

the lord of the (onion) rings

Today was not a great day at work.  But such days come to us all, and we can either sink into the gloom or turn on a lamp...

I had some time at home alone with my little guy this afternoon and decided to make the most of it.

The key to a happy life may be keeping your fry station all mise en place.

I had eggs, I had onion, I had milk, I had spices, and I had some cooking oil: I made onion rings.

The basic idea with frying battered foods is to coat the primary ingredient in something that will make a nice crunchy and/or flaky crust and leave what's inside cooked but mostly unbrowned.

In this case I used some half-and-half that was going unused, along with one egg for my wet ingredients, and some white flour, copious salt and pepper, and some chili powder for my dry ingredients.

Beyond that, it all comes down to getting the oil hot and not making too much of a mess in the kitchen.

Yummy.

I feel awful

Operation Falafel is a disaster, and I falafel about it.

This is apparently what happens when your falafel dough balls are not pre-chilled and/or the oil is not hot enough...the whole mixture just dissolves into a waste of time and spices.

It started with more promise; to make some tahini, I toasted sesame seeds and blended those together with some olive oil, onions, and spices.

The falafel dough seemed to be coming together well, also, with the beans all blended up with garlic and onion and even more spices.

This is what I salvaged...the tahini.  Now I just need to find some other dishes that go well with tahini!

Appetizer!

Steamed artichoke and "aioli" tonight on the deck with a taste of Cabernet ...yum, and different!

Operation: Secret Falafel - update!

She's on to me...apparently my lovely wife DOES occasionally check in on the food blog. Not to be deterred,  I pressed on with my plan, albeit on a modified schedule.

Since she's in the know, I decided to slow things down. The pic shows most of the gathered ingredients (I have not found fresh chickpeas yet and so am using canned); I suspect I will make a first run at this dish Monday or Tuesday afternoon. 

Stay tuned!

chicken experiment!

I defrosted chicken to cook tonight, but life got in the way and we had leftover sausage sauce and pasta (still good!)...but I felt the clock ticking on that chicken.

So I did what any mediocre suburban chef would do, and wound myself up for some chixperimenting...chickementaion...experimenting with chicken?

 I started with cold, raw, thawed chicken thighs and some Adobo...my plan was to steam the chicken with beer, but not with a can-in-butt grill style; no, this was going to be something new (at least, new to me.  And a quick Googling did not turn up any precedents).  I shook on a good bit of Adobo, assuming that beer steaming could leave the chicken a little bland.

 I poured a couple of cans of Miller Lite into my steamer pot (a dark beer like Negro Modelo might have been preferable for this application, but ML is my cheap, light beer of choice and in my recent carb-drought was the only beer I had around the house.)  Beer boils at a significantly lower temp than water, and since I had no guidance from the web about how long to steam chicken to doneness, I knew I would be doing some spot checking.

 I guessed that it was going to take ~ 20 minutes to get the chicken cooked through...when frying in oil, it can take 8 minutes per side (or more, in a pan), or about 20 minutes in a deep fryer to cook thoroughly.  I left the lid on tight, without so much as a peek, for 15 minutes, and then stuck in my supposedly-instant read thermometer (quick aside: I do not have good luck with food thermometers...I can never get one to read the desired, target temp, and I refuse to believe that this is user error...).  At 15 minutes, the temp showed ~ 175 F, while the guard on the thermometer suggested 180 would be a safe temp for chicken thighs.

 Even before beginning this experiment (fowl lab?) I had planned on finishing the chicken in a pan, at least a little, to provide a little crispness to the outside.  The thighs I buy are "skin-on", and crisp chicken skin is a Geburtstag gift from above.  So when I checked the in-steam temp at 20 minutes and it still registered a little below the 180 target, I did not fret but went ahead and removed the thighs to a preheated and slightly oiled pan.

 The pan may have been too hot (or maybe too cool...) - I was not paying as much attention to the finishing pan as I was to the steam pan (and the glass of Bacardi and Mexi-Coke by my work station) and the freakin' skin stuck a bit to the pan.  When I flipped the thighs over (just 2 minutes skin down), I had to pull the skin away from the pan separately.  Then, 2 minutes on the other side, and I removed to a plate.

My temp reading showed lower than before, but I cut into the chicken anyway.  The juices ran clear, and the meat looked more white than not ("dark" meat like thighs often will show some read near the bone anyway...it's a struggle if you are serving to sensitive people who don't relish the thought of salmonella poisoning...), and it tasted pretty nice!

I ended up eating a whole thigh there in the tasting station, and saved one for tomorrow.  There was not a whole lot of beer flavor (Miller Lite vs something heavier?), but I could definitely taste some beer and the chicken was tender.  Next time, I might let it go another 4 - 5 minutes, and will be more careful with the finishing pan.  But overall, I would consider this a worthwhile experiment, especially when one considers how boring chicken can become when featured often in a menu rotation.

"Pissaladière: funky French pizza"

Head over to SaltandFat.com to check out this recipe that my household will be trying as soon as I can find some nice puff pastry and anchovies.

Guest chef!

My lovely wife made an awesome spicy Italian sausage pasta sauce, built up from a shallot and pancetta base, which she then baked with some penne shells under a layer of mozzarella ...it was fantastic. 

She promised to cook again in another 7-8 weeks!

Oh, the things we eat!

announcing: top secret project!

FALAFEL

FOR

MY BABY

Of course I realize it doesn't seem like a secret when posted to the WWW, but I suspect that my sweetie (the "baby" referenced; another point of possible confusion, I know, given that I have an actual baby now, but my special lady friend will always be my baby too...) doesn't actually read the DRW FOOD blog often, so we may have a few days to operate in secrecy.

Before we left Chicago for the open embrace of Tennessee, my lovely wife became obsessed with falafel, in particular the sandwiches on offer at this store front in Lincoln Park:

View Larger Map

Now, I should interject that Chattanooga is not a food wasteland, devoid of any interesting restaurants...we have found some decent Thai, an Indian place nearby with good food, and a quick service place run by a Mediterranean family that sells, alone among hamburgers and cheesesteaks, a falafel sandwich!  But this falafel is not the same as that we left behind, and it's my super secret plan to attempt a recreation of that Chicago falafel here, in our own kitchen, and to surprise the wife with my efforts.

I'll be pulling together resources in this space over the coming days, and will begin to outline my approach.  We can all learn about falafel making together!

5 food rules from Slate

This article caught my eye this morning, in particular one of the "5 Rules":

Eat beans! They are one of the least expensive, most nutritious foods out there. Per capita Americans eat about 7.5 pounds of beans each year, compared with more than 200 pounds of meat.

Ugh - eating beans was not all bad, but the quantity I consumed for those weeks was challenging.  The other rules are interesting as well.

Bacon hack

I have long thought my grill pan mostly useless, as many things that I _could_ cook on it would be better on a different pan, the grill, the panini press, etc...but Bacon? Brilliant. There's room to lay it out flat, and the grill ridges allow the fat to move away more easily.

The W in DRW

Trying a new flavor...

Ha!

http://xkcd.com/854/

If you are new to XKCD, it pays to visit the site and "hover" your mouse over the comic image.

Sunday morning pancakes

So called because reader AdanA asked for new ideas for Sunday mornings...I actually made mine on CarbDaySaturday!!!

My lovely wife and baby-mamma claims these are the best pancakes she has ever had; I'm glad she likes them, and I wish I could claim they were my creation, but I'm just using Michael Ruhlman's basic recipe from his book Ratio.  I think Ruhlman is pretty clever, and the book is a nice edition to any kitchen library.

We will also consider this post an experiment in video blogging...the "pop" you hear between cuts is the pause button clicking as I basically edit the cuts while shooting...

I've also noticed while reviewing the video that I omitted the salt component from the series...there should have been a shot showing the addition of ~ 1.5 teaspoons of salt to the dry mix.

Ruhlman's book operates on this principal that recipes are basically fixed ratios of component ingredients, and that once a cook is aware of the proper (or classic?) ratios, that cook is then free to experiment around the edges with flavorings (add cinnamon, or fruit, or what have you, to the base pancake mix), or can experiment with the ratios to effect the ultimate consistency of the dish (fluffier pancakes?).

For the version I made in the video:

12 oz flour (and 12 oz milk - this one to one ratio of flour and milk is the basis of the recipe)
3 large eggs (your you are shooting for one egg to each 4 oz flour/milk)
3 oz butter (1 oz to 1 egg...also, have the butter melted before introducing to the wet mix.  Believe me.)
1.5 teaspoons of a quality vanilla extract.  Costco's store brand is crazy cheap.
3 table spoons of sugar (1 spoon to each oz butter or egg...see how this ratio thing scales?)
3 tea spoons baking powder
1.5 tea spoons salt (I just kind of free-ground over the dry bowl until it felt right)

That's 8 ingredients.  And it goes together quick; please do not buy a pancake mix again...life's too short.

Bittman leaving "the Minimalist" behind

I'm a little sad:

"TODAY marks the exit of The Minimalist from the pages of the Dining section, as a weekly column at least. There may be return appearances, but the unbroken string of more than 13 years and nearly 700 columns ends here."

Easy veggie side dish

I stumbled on this last week, and it will now be a recurring player in our household diet.

Sorry, I didn't take any pictures.

Shallots
Spinach
Olive Oil
Butter
Wine vinegar

Shallots rock, and if you are not already using them in your kitchen you are seriously missing out.  Dice up a decent sized shallot, and get them shimmering in a pan with some oil and butter (I used both in this case).  You need one of your larger pans for wilting down the spinach...I used a ~10 inch skillet.

Spinach will disappear on you - making this side dish for two people, I started with about 6 cups of loose spinach...maybe 4 big handfuls.  Start feeding the spinach into the pan, stirring it around and into the oily, shalloty mixture...you will probably want to reduce the heat a bit at this point.  Three or four minutes later, that big pile of spinach will have disappeared into maybe one big handful...it's amazing.

Right when you are ready to take the mix out of the pan and split onto your plates, add a spash - just a bit - of the vinegar (Balsamic or red wine vinegar) and eat that stuff down.

How do you flip four fried eggs?

 Carefully!  At least I like my yolks broken and set.

wine and beans? yum!

I started some chopped red onion and garlic in the pan in a little butter and olive oil; when those were nice and cozy I added a quarter glass of red wine.  We had a left over sausage (spicy italian pork, from a few days ago), so I cut it into chunks and dumped it in the pot with a can of Iberia black beans*.  I let it simmer while the "normals" in my house prepared to eat chicken and dumplings.

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*If I had to guess, I probably consumed something like 5 pounds of black beans in aggregate in my life pre-diet.  And I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that I've eaten 10+ pounds in the last two weeks.

Not so fast...

I realized after posting the baked eggs bit that I've given pretty short shrift here to the breakfast meal.

The basic diet model that I'm following from the 4-Hour Body agrees with your mom that breakfast is important.  The book specifically suggests that you should eat your breakfast early, and it too should be heavy on the protein and very light on the carbs.

 This interim step from today's breakfast shows another short-cut I've been taking lately: I warm the beans in the left over bacon fat after the bacon is good and crispy.

Then I fry the eggs in the same pan in the same residual bacon fat / bean goo.  Again, like the last post, this is about kitchen efficiency and covering the basics, not necessarily about creating a showcase for my culinary skills...

Leftovers

I try to buy all of meat fresh, but particularly the beef.  I do freeze some for later use, but I try to cook a day or two's worth of steak while the beef is fresh.  The picture shows a couple of shortcuts I've started taking with my "leftover" meat - beef or chicken or pork I cooked yesterday and stuck in the 'frig*.

Basically, I cut the beef up into little chunks and dropped them into the pot with the canned beans to warm at the same time.  When they are warmed through, I lay the mix across some fresh spinach - the heat from the meat and beans helps wilt the spinach a little.  This method is not my preference for creating a specific flavor mix or visually appealing plate (I would not serve this to others at a dinner party) but it's a quick fix and dirties only one pan.

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*I know from past experience that AdanA does not care for the abbreviated forms of the word "refrigerator", in particular "fridge" - knowing this and being also aware that AdanA currently represents ~ 20% of my readership, I'm throwing him a bone here with a shot at a more correct shortening of the word...we'll see how it goes.

Baked Eggs and browned pig discs!

 A little butter smeared in the bottom of the baking dish (in this case a French Onion Soup crock), and a handful of spinach leaves, torn for sizing.

 Three eggs, some shallot, and some salt and black pepper.

After ~ 15 minutes or so (could be 12, could be 17, anywhere between 350 and 400 - using a toaster oven so it's best to not get too specific here - just check the yolks for "firmness")

Yum!

chicken in the pan!

 I started with these bone-in thighs, and sprinkled them with paprika and garlic powder...when I do this dish the next time, I think I will wait and add the spices to the "skin side" after it's turned up after the first round of cooking.

 I got the pan to the right heat using the technique detailed here, and then added a very little bit of Canola oil.  I cooked each side (skin side down first!) for between 4-5 minutes, and then set them aside on some paper towels to drain.

Served with raw broccoli (there was more there, but I munched a bit during the chicken cook time), and a can of black beans warmed with some Adobo seasoning.

Tuesday Night Pork Chops

 Sprinkled with chili powder, salt, and pepper...

 Cooked in a very little bit of Canola oil...

and served alongside some steamed broccoli and beans warmed with Tony Chachere's seasoning.

One word of warning:  I am forever trying to figure out exact cooking times to get to my level of doneness, and I took these off the heat just a tad early, requiring a spin in the microwave to get the centers white...

Good rule of thumb for chicken and pork - it's probably going to take 8 minutes to cook through on the grill or in the pan or in the fryer...maybe 4 minutes on a press grill like in the Sunday steak post.

A word about that pan - it's a small All-Clad deal, stainless inside and out, and it's awesome.  My sister gave it as a Xmas gift this year, and I've already used it more than 10 times.  I have cabinets FULL of non-stick (high quality non-stick, mostly Calphalon Pro), and I'm really digging the metal vibe from this pan.