Right back at you with Cornish Hens (or, as my uncle would remind us all, Baby Chickens):

So, a couple of weeks ago at the supermarket cornish hens were on sale. Whenever I can get a pair for less than $6 I usually jump at the chance because they are pretty versatile and usually make for dinners that look as good as they taste. Anyway, I found an interesting recipe for Cornish Hens with a Maple-Mustard Glaze on epicurious.com and gave it a shot. This is an incredibly easy preparation and would be equally good on oven roasted chicken thighs/breasts/legs, turkey, etc.

For the glaze, mix 2 tablespoons of maple syrup, 1.5 tablespoons of butter, 1 tablespoon of dijon mustard, and 1 teaspoon of dried thyme in a small saucepan, simmer, and whisk until the butter has melted and the glaze has come together. Preheat your oven to 350 (f). Dry off the bird(s) and season inside and out with salt and pepper. I chopped up some mushrooms, onions, and mixed these with a little more dried thyme and stuffed the birds for a little added flavor, but that is optional. Set your timer for 50 minutes, and put the birds in the oven on the middle rack. Baste them with the maple-mustard glaze every ten minutes. At 50 minutes, insert a thermometer into the deepest part of the thigh muscle and continue to roast until the internal temperature hits 175 (f). At this point, remove the birds from the oven and let them rest. The carry over heat should push the temperature of the meat to about 180.

I split the birds into quarters and served them with mashed potatoes and corn bread (half a recipe from the side of the Quaker corn meal container, plus a teaspoon and a half of dried thyme) with mushroom gravy (from a simple roux and some homemade mushroom stock) and a side salad. The skin of the birds was incredibly flavorful, with a nice balance of sweetness from the maple syrup and spiciness from the mustard. The thyme in the background really tied the dish together, however. My wine for the evening was a 2004 Altos las Hormigas Malbec from Mendoza, Argentina. I thought it did nicely in terms of playing off the thyme flavor that I had used as a central component of the birds and the mushroom gravy.

Gnocchi:

I was in the mood for some simple, classic flavors the other night and had recently picked up a package of gnocchi at the supermarket, so I decided just to serve it with a simple marinara with some herbs. This time I made the sauce from scratch, sauteeing some garlic and red pepper in olive oil, adding a can of tomatoes (crushed by hand), some oregano and thyme, and a little sugar. Once those flavors had come together a bit, I added some white wine and a few basil leaves and let it simmer away while I put together a salad. When the gnocchi was just short of cooked, I added it to the sauce and then finished with some shredded basil leaves, a little asiago cheese, and a slice of prosciutto. Very nice, clean, simple flavors.

I had a glass of a Spanish granache along with it that was excellent for the $7 that I got it for. Mina already threw the bottle away, though, so I will have to get the name of it when we visit the wine shop on our next shopping excursion.

Salt:

When I was younger, I never gave much thought to salt. It was just one of those things that you had in the kitchen. Though it's an ingredient in most recipes you see, I often cooked without it, preferring to experiment with other flavors instead. A few years ago, though, Mina came home with a little box of Guerande Sea Salt from France (http://www.eco-natural.com/greysalt/fleurdesel.html) and we tried scattering a few crystals on some charcoal grilled beef. The flavor was one of those true revelations and started us down a path of collecting "finishing salts" from around the world. Now, we have 7 or 8 types of salt in our kitchen, the vast majority of which are used sparingly right at the table as a way of giving a piece of meat that extra little pop. Currently our list of finishing salts looks like this:

1) Le Paludier Fleur de Sel de Guerande (link above)

2) Noto Peninsula Natural Sea Salt (from Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan - http://www.atthemeadow.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_88&products_id=360&zenid=d9ee5261119b03c10ce36425fc0ebf05)

3) Kumejima Natural Sea Salt (from Okinawa Prefecture, Japan　-
http://www.sekaino-osio.com/shop/searchdetail.jsp?mode=itemid&val=000111&x=43&y=9)

4) Maine Sea Salt (http://www.maineseasalt.com/)

5) Himalayan Pink Salt

Anyway, this past weekend we found some flanken style short ribs (cut across the bone rather than perpendicualr to it) of the sort you might find grilled in a Korean BBQ and decided to grill them up and serve with some different salts. I also put out some grated daikon radish and Yuzu Ponzu to use as a dipping sauce for a change of pace. The meat was pre-seasoned with "sansho", a Japanese version of szechuan pepper (http://www.asiafood.org/glossary_1.cfm?alpha=S&startno=27&endno=51), mashed garlic, and olive oil and was then grilled (unfortunately, it was pouring rain, so I did this on the grill pan indoors rather than on the charcoal grill). I served a salad of mixed greens with some nectarine and slivered almonds and some roasted potatoes along side. The French sea salt was as good as you expect it to be, but we were surprised with how nice the Noto salt was with this flavor combination.

The other dish I feature here today was last night's dinner. We had some chicken sausage in the freezer and I decided to try a frittata with it. I fried some thinly sliced potatoes until they were crisp to form the base and then sauteed the sausage with some red onion and a little sliced jalapeno pepper (one of my missions is to secretly teach Mina to like spicy foods). I laid the potatoes on the bottom of a cast iron pan, covered these with the sausage mixture, and then poured over 6 beaten eggs. This went into a 325 degree oven until the eggs had set, and then was topped with grated cheddar cheese and cilantro. The basic idea for this came from a Guy Fieri recipe that I found on foodnetwork.com, but the potato base was my addition to the party. A quick and hearty dinner that would obviously be a good breakfast as well.

Ramen:

Mina and I are back from a quick trip to Japan for my sister-in-law's wedding, some meetings at Ritsumeikan University, and visits with friends. This was our first trip back since moving to the U.S. for graduate school, so it was good to see most of my friends (my sincerest apologies to those I didn't have time to get together with...I hope to be back over Christmas/New Year or next May at the latest), drink my fill of ice cold Japanese draft beer, and eat, eat, eat.

My regular reader will know that Mina and I drove 9 hours round trip this past Japanese to visit a Japanese supermarket in New Jersey and eat Ramen, so it will come as no surprise that I had a few bowls while I was in Japan. If you have never had a true bowl of ramen, you should realize that your experience with those packets of instant noodles that you get at the supermarket pale in comparison. I would be hard pressed to come up with another instant/convenience food that is so far away from the real thing. Maybe Totinos Pizza Rolls?

Anyway, this time around I had 2 really memorable bowls of Ramen. The first was on Day 2 of the trip, in the Akebonobashi section of Tokyo near Tokyo Women's University Hospital. This was a place called "Tengu" that claimed to have some of the more renowned "Tan-Tan Mein" in the city. Tan-Tan Mein is a ramen in a spicy soup that is heavy on the ground sesame. I have had it with both white and black sesame, and have to say that I prefer the white sesame version, which is what this shop specialized in. Not knowing what I was getting myself into, I ordered the shop's suggested heat level, though I could probably have gone a level or two higher for lunch without any problem. The noodles were perfectly al dente, the pork was lovely, and the soup was flavorful, with its sesame base very potent. We also shared an order of fried Gyoza, which were good, if not fantastic.

 

The next great bowl I had was closer to the end of the trip, on Day 15. We were back in Tokyo after 8 days of R&R in Mina's hometown of Iwaki and were staying with my sister- and brother-in-law in Eifuku-cho, which is just out west of Shinjuku. During my travels, I had noticed an outpost of an Eifuku-cho ramen joint among the ramen shops at Nagoya Station, and we got directions to it from my brother-in-law. The first thing that struck my about this bowl was its sheer size. This was one place that was not skimping on noodles, shar-sui pork, or soup. One taste, and I knew we had found something special.

The soup had a depth and complexity to it that I guessed (correctly, I later learned) came from smoked bonito flakes. It's hard to explain exactly how this tasted, but the combination of this flavor with the soy sauce "tare" that formed the backbone of this bowl was stunning. We ordered ours with raw eggs, and allowed those to cook in the hot broth while we slurped down the noodles. The char-sui was expertly cooked, and also carried the unmistakable taste of having been cooked over charcoal. This was a really great bowl of ramen.

Now, if only I could figure out how to make a soup that good, I could open a ramen shop here in the U.S. and be an ambassador for this amazing noodle experience. Anyone else out there have any great ramen stories or shops to recommend?