Grow. Cook. Eat.

Spicy Mayo

When I make sushi at home, I usually shop at the Kotobukiya Market. The fish is reliably fresh and the selection is great. The problem is, when I decide to make sushi, I’m usually already hungry, so I need a little snack. They have little rice balls with savory toppings wrapped in seaweed. For $1.50, it’s a great tie-me-over. Toppings include: miso, spicy tuna, nuto, and salmon. After trying them all, I decided I like the tuna best.

So much so, that I’ll make it at home for myself all the time as a go-to lunch. Maybe it sounds strange to serve tuna salad with rice, but think about a spicy tuna maki roll.

Spicy Mayonnaise
1 teaspoon Lan Chi chili-garlic paste (more or less, to taste)
2 tablespoons Hellman’s (sorry, Lydia… no Miracle Whip here)

Mix the spicy mayo with drained, canned tuna. Serve over steamed rice with nori sheets.

The Spicy Mayo also makes a great rub for grilled corn.

Kitchen Tools - Spice Grinder

My kitchen is small. Tiny, really. So small that I need to consider each piece of equipment for it to warrant space. I have a coffee bean grinder, but not a spice grinder. Some people use the same type of grinder for both jobs, but have two – one for coffee and the other for spices. I just don’t have the cupboard or counter space for both. Since I grind coffee beans every day, it wins the appliance challenge. But I do like fresh ground pepper – and once a month, I grind fresh peppercorns in my coffee bean grinder.

 

But Julia, you ask, how do you keep the pepper from tasting like coffee? Because I clean the grinder first. And so I don’t electrocute myself, I need to clean the grinder with a dry cleanser – that is, no soap and water. The best tool: raw rice. I grind ¼ cup raw rice to a fine powder. I discard the rice and wipe out the basin. Voila! A clean spice grinder. I don’t bother cleaning in the other direction, because I rather like the idea of a little peppercorn in my coffee.

 

Before.....

 

 

After....

Lambapalooza!!

I had been talking about this for months – the half lamb I was getting as payment for work I had done for Brett. The lamb had been raised by his friends Donna and Cameron down the road. I had been to their farm last summer. It sits on the tip of the Potomac River, just before it meets up with the Chesapeake Bay. They raise about 20 lamb at a time and they are bottle fed twice a day. They lead an idyllic life. The evening I visited their farm, Cameron prepared a dish from his native Iran: lamb kebabs marinated with rose water, yogurt, saffron and a few other spices. The flavor and aroma were intoxicating.

Last week I picked up the lamb – which Brett had kindly slaughtered, aged and butchered for me. Normally, I would have helped with that chore, but my work schedule prevented me from making a timely visit. Nonetheless, I picked up my share and returned home with a trunk-full of meat and other assorted fresh produce from Brett’s farm.

In honor of this momentous occasion, I invited a dozen friends for Lambapalooza. Even with such a large crowd, we only consumed about ¼ of my share.

Barbecued Lamb with Sweet Potato Biscuits

I braised the lamb shanks with red wine, mirepoix and chicken stock. When the meat was falling off the bone tender, I shredded it and tossed it with my smoked tomato ketchup (which doubles as barbecue sauce). I made sweet potato biscuits and sandwich the lamb and arugula in the middle.

Sweet Potato Soup with Roasted Corn and Chipotle – Lamb Sausage

Sauté sweet potatoes with garlic, onions, carrots and celery in butter. When the onions start to soften, deglaze with white wine and water (or chicken stock). Simmer until the vegetables are soft. Puree and season with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and cream. Serve hot, topped with roasted corn (cut off the cob) and diced pieces of chipotle lamb sausage.

Minted Lamb with Minted French Lentils and Peachy Mama Jam

Sweat shallots and garlic in olive oil. When they are soft add cumin and coriander. Let cool. Season meat generously with salt and pepper. Rub lamb with onion/garlic/oil mix, lots of mint and a little balsamic vinegar. Serve on a bed of lentils that have been cooked with mirepoix, ginger and curry and seasoned with mint just before serving. Garnish with Peachy Mama Jam just before serving.

Tandoori Lamb with Grilled Naan

My tandoori marinade recipe comes from a cookbook I purchased in Singapore. The first time I prepared this recipe, I was amazed at how the flavor so closely resembled that which I had eaten in restaurants. I have recreated many Asian-style restaurant dishes at home…but this is the first recipe that actually tasted like what I had eaten in restaurants.

Platters of Roasted, Grilled and Sautéed Vegetables

Roasted Brussel Sprouts, Grilled Zucchini, Roasted Beets with Pistachios, Broccoli Raab sautéed with Garlic and chiles, and green beans sautéed with ginger and lime leaves.

...and for dessert - two more masterpieces from Dina

Chocolate Mocha Opera Torte

Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Butter Cream

A special thanks to David for taking photos!

Methi, Eggplant and Potato Masala

Russo’s Market in Watertown has an extraordinary produce selection – appealing to just about every ethnic group from South East Asian to Armenia to Europe and the Americas. I can often find unusual herbs and vegetables that I’ve seen in my travels or in ethnic cookbooks. It makes for more adventurous culinary experimentation. There are several things I see on a regular basis that I have no idea how to use. One such thing is methi leaves.

When I signed up to participate in “Taste & Create,” I didn’t expect to encounter such exotic ingredients. Taste & Create is a monthly food blog event, in which participants are randomly paired with other food bloggers and asked to choose and prepare a recipe from their partner's blog. I was paired with “Tasty Curry Leaf.” The recipes on this blog have a decided Indian, vegetarian bent. As I browsed through the recipes looking for something fun to try, and I was beside myself to find a recipe that used an ingredient I had seen in the markets, but had never cooked.

I’m not as familiar with Indian cooking so I was intrigued by some of the techniques. Most notably, the raw potatoes are salted before cooking. The excess water is squeezed out. And unlike typical French fried potatoes, the salty seasoning penetrates and satiates.

The methi leaves are considered a vegetable and not an herb. As they are sold with the roots attached, like cilantro or basil, this was not overtly obvious. When cooked, they retain more substance than spinach but have a similar texture: a cross between crunchy and creamy. If you can't find methi leaves, watercress would make a fine substitution.

Though the spice combination is straightforward, the flavors are quintessential Indian: a wonderful and simple recipe. The one modification I made was the addition of a few drops of lemon juice. The next day, we made omelets with the leftovers.

Ingredients:

Potato:1 cubed
Eggplant:1 cubed
(long purple Chinese eggplant/long green eggplant)
Methi leaves: 1 bunch
Onion: 1 medium
Tomato:1 medium
Chilli powder:1/2 tsp
Coriander Powder:1/2 tsp
Turmeric Powder:1/4 tsp
Salt:as per taste

Preparation:

Cube the potato and eggplant.Apply salt to them and deep fry in hot oil after squeezing them.For potato cubes,you soak them in salted water in order to season them and also prevent them from turning brown. For eggplant you simply apply salt and keep aside.You squeeze the salted eggplant to remove the bitterness if any.Make sure you squeeze the potatoes and eggplants as well before deep frying.

Now you can avoid deep frying by roasting them in the oven.This is my enhancement to the masala.You squeeze the salted potatoes and eggplant cubes and roast them in a 475F oven for 20 minutes (potatoes) and 10-15 minutes for eggplants in a greased dish.

Chop onions into long thin pieces.Cube tomatoes as well.You can also use tomato puree or tamarind paste/concentrate instead of tomatoes.Chop the methi leaves.Keep aside.

Heat oil in a pan.Add chopped onions,saute till brown.Then add tomatoes cubed/pureed/tamarind concentrate,fried /roasted cubes and salt and powders.Saute till oil separates,add methi leaves and saute for a second then add water and cook till done.

Serve with rotis or rice.

Sitting on the Dock of the Bay

This visit to the farm was under the guise of picking up my lamb. Last spring, I had done a lot of office work for Brett and my compensation was a half a lamb – raised by friends Donna and Cameron down the road. Two weeks ago, the lamb was slaughtered. After two-week of aging in the walk-in refrigerator, the meat is tenderized and ready for butchery. The prime cuts - the rack and loin chops are set aside. The stewing meat, from the shoulder and ham, are ground for sausages -- chipotle and peachy mama flavored. The leg of lamb is left on the bone and makes for a generous roast. The long bones from the rack still have meat and are destined for barbecued ribs.

I arrived late Wednesday afternoon, and Brett and I promptly trotted over to the Chesapeake Bay, just yards away from the farm (actually we took the tractor, but that’s a another story). The neighbor had built a dock on the edge of his property, which creates a perfect landing for fishing and crabbing. The crab traps dangle from the base of the dock, and the bluefish and perch swim about, striped bass sometimes makes an appearance, but not often. The night before Brett had been fishing with his friend Bob so we used the skin and bones from that catch as bait for our fishing adventure. The left-over bait was put in the crab-traps… drifting on the floor of the bay, crabs meander in, eat the bait and get trapped. We set free the females and take the males. With the dwindling crab population, we want to minimize any long-term damage of harvesting sea creatures.

What did we catch, you ask? Let me put it this way: they call it “fishing,” not “catching”…. We did catch some warm breezes, mesmerizing bay views and a lone male crab – which made a delightful snack.

If we had more crabs, we would have made crab cakes:

Crab Cakes with Warm Frisee and Spinach Salad with Mustard Vinaigrette and Bacon Lardons

Crab Cakes

1 lb. crab meat
2 tbs. chopped celery
2 tbs. chopped scallion
1 tbs. chopped fresh tarragon
1 tbs. chopped fresh parsley
1 tsp. mustard
2 tbs. mayonnaise
2 tbs. bread crumbs
1 tsp. lemon zest
1 tsp. lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste
plain oil


1. Mix everything together except the oil. Season to taste with salt and pepper
2. Heat a large skillet over medium high heat. Add oil
3. Form mix into 2” crab cakes. Pan fry until crispy on each side. Serve with salad.

Vinaigrette

2 tsp. Dijon mustard
2 tsp. red wine vinegar
2 ½ tbs. extra virgin olive oil
½ tsp. fresh thyme
salt and pepper to taste


Combine mustard and vinegar in a bowl. Whisk in olive oil. Season with thyme, salt and pepper.

Salad

1 pound hardy mesclun or other salad greens such as frisee or spinach
3 slices slab bacon
1 red onion, julienned


1. Cut bacon into cubes. Cook in skillet over medium flame until it is just start to brown (but not fully crispy)
2. Add onions, turn heat to high and continue cooking for 3 minutes or until bacon and onions are crisp.
3. Drain excess fat from bacon, and toss warm bacon over greens. Dress salad with the vinaigrette. Season to taste with salt and pepper.


Next week: Lambapalooza!

Goodbye Summer

The basil plants are spindily and the leaves small. But the fragrance is pure summer! With the white and purple buds, they make a beautiful bouquet for the kitchen counter.

Bouche de Noel

My friend Leslie is teaching a class on Bûche de Noël - the classic French Christmas Treat. In preparation, she wanted to do a trial run to test the timing of the class, and also to get pictures for the class posting.

We all know, I’m not a good baker and more a salt-head, than a sweet tooth. Nonetheless, I have a secret dream of being a star, cake decorator. I even bought a cake turn-table for when the urge strikes. Probably once a year, I make a few pounds of butter cream, a couple of cakes and decorate to my heart’s content. They look like pouffy wedding dresses reminiscent of the 1980’s (read: overdone and not particularly fashionable), and I never eat them, but it’s fun. That being said, I couldn’t miss an opportunity to watch and learn, so I offered to take pictures (just for her, I SWEAR!)

According to Wikipedia:

One popular story behind the creation of this dessert is that Napoleon I of France issued a proclamation requiring households in Paris to keep their chimneys closed during the winter, based on the notion that cold air caused medical problems. This prevented Parisians from being able to use their fireplaces, and, thus, prevented them from engaging in many of the traditions surrounding and involving the hearth in French Christmas tradition. French bakers, according to the theory, invented this dessert as a symbolic replacement around which the family could gather for story-telling and other holiday merriment.

The cake, which ultimately looks like a tree log with mushrooms, can be made with either a vanilla or chocolate sponge cake and filled with chocolate or vanilla buttercream. The cake is lighter than traditional genoise which makes it easy to roll. This cake batter is so light that it can only be used as a sheet-cake and can’t stand up to a layer cake. The mushrooms are made with Italian Meringue.

Before you can even think about assembling the cake, you must assemble all the parts: cake, filling, icing/glaze. For the garnish: rosemary sprigs to look like pine needle covered in ice and meringue mushrooms. The special equipment is limited to a piping bag with a round tip, a “decorating triangle” (used to texturize the icing to look like bark) and a good icing spatula.

For the Cake and the other components:

Cake
6 large eggs, separated
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
12 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup cake flour, sifted
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder, sifted

Separate the egg whites from the egg yolks. Whip the egg yolks with sugar until they are thick and pale. In a separate bowl, whip the egg whites sugar to stiff peaks. Fold the whites into the yolks. Sift the cocoa powder and flour onto to the egg mixture and gently fold to combine. Bake on a sheet tray for 15 minutes at 400F.

The filling is less persnickety. You can use a traditional buttercream or a modified version of simply beaten butter with white chocolate. The filling can also be used to glaze the outside of the cake or you can use a chocolate ganache:

Ganache
1/2 cup whipping cream
6 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1 tablespoon rum or other favorite liquor

Heat heavy cream over medium heat until bubbles form around the edge. Remove from heat. Stir in remaining ingredients. Continue to stir until chocolate dissolves.

For the mushrooms, make a French meringue.

½ cup egg whites
1 cup sugar
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar.

Dissolve sugar in egg whites over a pot of simmering water, whisking constantly, and heat until 110F degrees. Remove from heat and then whip until stiff peaks. To make the mushrooms pipe out mounds to be the caps, and pipe up 1” stems. Bake at 200F for 45 minutes and the 175 for another 30 minutes to dehydrate. When they are dried, you can brush the bottom of the mushroom caps with melted chocolate. Using a small paring knife, cut a little indentation into the base of the mushroom cap. Use chocolate or icing to glue the stem into the cap.

To make pine needles, dip rosemary sprigs in beaten egg whites, then roll in granulated sugar.

Assembly
Ice the sheet cake. Roll it lengthwise, and roll the seam to the bottom. Slice the cake, 1/3 portion, on a bias to create two pieces – on that is twice as long as the other. Put the longer piece on a serving platter. Take the smaller piece, and align the angled side along the longer piece. This should give you the basic shape of a log. Ice the whole cake to cover the seam, but leave the ends un-iced to show off the roll. Run the decorating triangle along the outside to texturize.

Garnish with mushrooms and pine needles.

To register for Leslie’s class, visit: www.helenrennie.com

More Adventures in Smoking: Bluefish

There are several truths in my culinary world: everything fried tastes better and everything smoked tastes better. Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule – thinking about all the fresh vegetables coming out of the garden (good!) and about that smoked oil (bad!).

Bluefish fits perfectly into that rule. Some people enjoy it fresh, but with a strong, oily flavor it’s better suited to smoking and more universally liked that way. I love having little snacks in the fridge for when unexpected guests come over, and smoked bluefish is a great option. Whole Foods sells smoked bluefish pâté but I was wholly disappointed to discover it contains high fructose corn syrup. The only solution is to make my own.

Smoked Bluefish Pâté
To smoke bluefish: Season ½ pound filet with salt, pepper and a little sugar. Start a charcoal fire on the grill. Meanwhile, soak wood chips in water. When charcoal fire starts to fade, prepare to smoke and move quickly: Drain wood chips and toss on top of the embers. Replace the grate on top of the grill and put the bluefish on the grate… away from the fire. Close the grill and the vents on top – leave the vents on the bottom open. Let fish smoke for 30 minutes or more.

In a food processor fitted with a plastic blade, combine bluefish with 4 ounces cream cheese, 1 tablespoon brandy, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, salt and black pepper. Pulse to combine. Stir in chopped scallions. Serve with crackers.

Adventures in Smoking

Welcome to my journey of culinary exploration. What started as a way to incorporate more bacon into my diet, ended in a discovery of a new taste sensation!

It all started with a post by Canary Girl. She wrote about bacon mayonnaise: mayonnaise made with rendered bacon fat instead of the usual vegetable oil. I was beside myself with the genius of this idea. But as I thought about it, the logistics seemed somewhat challenging. Bacon grease solidifies at room temperature which would make it seemingly difficult to emulsify into mayo. The really beauty of the idea, my thought- process continued, is the smoky, salty fat. So if I made “smoked” oil, then I could make mayo without bacon – and have a recipe that my non-pork eating friends would like.

Given my history of setting fires in other people’s kitchen, smoking oil wasn’t one of my better ideas. This is what I did… I lit a charcoal fire (yes, that’s right, open flame) in the Weber grill on the patio. When the embers started to fade, I threw on soaked wood chips. I put the grate on, and on the side without the flame, I put on a pot of canola oil. Oh, and as long as I was smoking, I put a second pan with home grown chilies and more oil. Thank goodness I’m still here to tell the tale, because I could have created a massive fire. But I didn’t and I ended up with some smoky oil and chilies.

With the oil, I made mayonnaise. Unfortunately, it tasted like the bottom of an ashtray. It probably would have been better with equal parts regular oil and smoked oil. As I recounted my tale to my neighbors they mentioned yet another brilliant idea: popcorn in bacon fat! And so the culinary journey continued…….

I rendered bacon over low heat – wanting to release the fat without crisping the bacon.

When enough fat coated the bottom of the pan, I added the corn kernels. While the corn popped, the bacon continued to crisp. After 10 minutes, I had fluffy popcorn mixed with crispy bacon bits. A quick toss with salt… The bacon flavor was good, but very subtle – I had used three slices for 1 cup of popcorn. Next time, I will need to use more bacon.

Since I also had the smoked chili oil, I decided to pop corn in that. Now THAT was delicious. Surprisingly smoky and unexpectedly spicy, it was a great success for pre-dinner cocktail snacks. Thanks to Canary Girl for inspiring this journey!

Shameless Self Promotion

Today's Boston Globe featured an article about the locavore banquet and included the recipe for my squash soup. Unfortunately, the on-line version does not include the recipe...

As a side note, my mother says:

Time to think of another tag line. It is not Shameless Self Promotion. It is keeping your family and friends informed. Shameless self-promotion has a negative connotation.

Dina responds:

I agree with your mother

David responds:

Your mom is the best part!