First of 2009 - Pork Tenderloin with a Peanut Satay Sauce (adapted from a recipe by Bobby Flay - http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/bobby-flay/pork-satay-recipe/index.html):

I had a taste for some Asian flavors yesterday, so put my thinking cap on, searched around the internet, and eventually decided on this recipe. The original is actually for skewered pork, but I decided to roast my pork tenderloin whole and then spoon the sauce over at the end. I also had neither the time nor enough peanut butter to marinate the pork for the recommended 2-4 hours, so I just skipped that step. My guess is that you'd have a much spicier, richer dish for that step.

Anyway, I started by making a half batch of the sauce, substituting a couple of squirts of Sriracha sauce for the recommended Thai bird chili pepper. This kept the heat in the background and at a level that the Lovely Mina, who is not (yet) a big fan of spicy food, can handle. With that done, I seasoned my smallish pork tenderloin and seared it over medium heat (well, medium on my stove, which is actually pretty hot) for 4 minutes per side. I then finished the meat in a 375 degree oven until the internal temperature hit 150 f. I rested the meat under an aluminum foil tent for 5+ minutes and then sliced. On went the sauce.

In an ideal world I would have served this with some jasmine rice. But, we didn't have any, so I went with some simple pan roasted potatoes and a salad. An ice cold beer on the side completed things.

An Amazing Dinner - Chicken with Spicy Plum Sauce and Focaccia with Tonnato and Anchovies:

My reader knows by now that I take a chance now and then when I cook. While I am usually pretty excited about the things that I cook, there is once in a while a meal that I am really surprised by, a combination of flavors that is new, unexpected, and just a real treat. This weekend's chicken dish was one of those. This was another Food & Wine magazine recipe, slightly modified to fit my pantry and Mina's tastes for spiciness.

The chicken is remarkably simple. I sauteed about 1/8 cup of diced red onion in butter, then added a black plum that I had chopped into 1/2 inch chunks. The plum breaks down, and at that point, I mixed in 1/8 cup of Thai Sweet and Spicy Chili relish and a tablespoon of dijon mustard. All of this went into a food processor, and that was the sauce. I grilled up some chicken thighs and slathered on the sauce.

The tonnato sauce for the focaccia is made with anchovy filets, capers, roasted red peppers, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, and mayonaisse all whacked together in a food processor. A little olive oil on the bread and a slice of red pepper and another anchovy filet on top, you have a little side dish. Just a lovely, fresh flavor.

Together with this I had a Camelot Pinot Noir. Normally, I find this wine a little weak, but I trusted the guy at the wine store who said this was a good wine to go with plums. Pretty decent, if not spectacular.

The food, though. Wow. If only I can do this well again next week.

Turkey Leg Osso Bucco (Adapted from Emiril Lagase and Epicurious.com):

I usually go to the supermarket without a clear plan of what I want to cook for the weekend meals. Mina and I maintain a reasonably well stocked pantry and have 15 varieties of herbs growing on the balcony, and this allows me to arrive at the store and create menus in my head based on what looks good in terms of meat, fish, vegetables, and fruit.

This week I saw some turkey drumsticks and a turkey back that were pretty reasonably priced and I remembered seeing this take on Osso Bucco on Emeril Live a few months or more back. The forecast was for thunderstorms all afternoon, so this seemed like it might make for a good Sunday dinner.

The recipe is relatively simple. Chop some onion, carrot, celery, and garlic. Dredge the turkey legs in seasoned flour and brown on all sides. Sweat the vegetables and deglaze the pan with some white wine. Add a can of tomatoes, some thyme and a bay leaf, and return the turkey legs to the pan. Add some chicken or turkey stock to the pan and cover, placing the whole thing in a 350 degree oven. Braising takes about an hour, but be sure to check the level of the liquid every 15-20 minutes, adding more stock as necessary.

In the meantime, prepare a gremolata of chopped parsley, lemon zest, and orange zest to top the dish with when serving. 20 minutes prior to serving, add a cup or so of Orzo pasta to the pan (it looks like rice, but is pasta). When the orzo is al dente, the meat should be falling off the bone and ready to serve. I macerated some strawberries in balsamic vinegar and honey and served those as the dressing for a simple salad.

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.

A Couple of Winners:

Well, dear readers, it's been a couple of hectic weeks at school, but here we are on Spring Break. For the undergrads (and those who remember that experience), that seems to mean trips to Jamaica, Mexico, and other destinations far more exotic than anywhere I ever went for S.B. For PhD students, though, Spring Break means studying 9-6 instead of 8-7 plus 9-11. We've got to recharge the batteries too, you know!

Anyway, that all means more time in the kitchen, so today I have two recipes to introduce. First, is a lovely bay scallop risotto. Now, I much prefer the big meaty sea scallops that brown up nicely, but in a pinch bay scallops are quite yummy. They also cost MUCH less. This week I picked up about 300 grams for $3.00, where the same weight of sea scallops was going for $10. Bay Scallops are small, though, so the sear doesn't work as well as you might like. This is why I tend to use them for pasta sauces, mousses, and this risotto.

Here, I started with a bunch of shrimp skins that we had been saving in the freezer. Those, a clove of garlic, some onion, celery, carrot, bay leaves, and peppercorns went into a pot to simmer for a couple of hours to make a lovely shrimp stock. Following that I went with basic risotto technique. In the last 5 minutes of cooking I added some thinly sliced mushrooms and the bay scallops. When ready to serve, I hit it was some paremsan and some chiffonade of red and green shiso leaves. Shiso leaves, for those who don't know, are sometimes called Japanese basil, though I find them to taste nothing like basil. Still, they are a pungent herb with an incredibly fresh taste. Lovely for this dish. A nice, dry Spanish rose was the perfect wine for this.

In the meantime, I also had the urge for some Mexican food. I love enchiladas and so decided to go with some meatless, black bean enchiladas for something a little lighter. I sauteed up some onion and garlic, and then mixed in a can of black beans that had been drained and rinsed. Add some cumin and paprika to taste, along with a diced jalapeno. You could go with more jalapeno or even a habanero here if you live with someone who likes spicy food (which I do not, so I do what I can to sneak some spice into our food...one of these days she'll get used to it, I figure).

I poured some enchilada sauce on the bottom of the caserole and then warmed each tortilla one by one in a little oil. Fill each, roll them up, cover with sauce, and top with cheese. These go into a 400 degree oven for 15 minutes or so until the cheese is nice and bubbly. I served these with some fresh cilantro, sour cream, and lime juice.

Hopefully I will have another chance to cook this week, but it all depends on how the research papers go...

More Food - Pasta with Sardines:

Talking with Mina this week, we both thought that having some fish over the weekend seemed like a good idea. The fish selection at our markets here in Syracuse is lacking, but at the local Price Chopper there is more of a selection than anywhere else and yesterday I was able to pick up some fresh sardines.

I am a big fan of Jamie Oliver's recipes, and made pasta last night based on his recipe for pasta with sardines (from the Jamie's Italy cookbook). I chopped up an onion and most of a fennel bulb and ground up some fennel seeds in a mortar and pestle. These I put into a frying pan over relatively low heat with some red chili flakes and let them cook for about 20 minutes, getting some good caramelization. In the meantime, we gutted and filleted the sardines, and sliced the filets into bite sized pieces.

Once the vegetables had caramelized nicely, the sardines went into the pan with some white wine, some chopped tomatoes, and some good kalamata olives (Jaime suggests the tomatoes, and I added the olives to the party), and I let the sauce cook down. In the meantime, I boiled water for pasta and got that going. Just as the pasta neared al dente, it went into the pan, and then into the pasta bowl. I topped it with the fennel fronds for color, and hit it with just a little lemon juice and some good extra virgin olive oil. Upon serving, a little finishing salt completed the dish. Pretty darn good, we thought.

Mango-Chipotle BBQ Chicken:

To celebrate the beginning of football season, I decided to experiment with a new BBQ sauce and grill up some chicken. I've been experimenting with BBQ sauces using bourbon lately as I think it has a deep, smoky flavor that adds some complexity. I thought that some fruit would temper the spice of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, and so came up with this idea.

To make this sauce, I sweated about a quarter of a finely diced onion and two pressed cloves of garlic in a little olive oil. Next, I added a quarter of a large mango that I had cut into a small dice, one diced chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, 1/8 cup of bourbon, and 1/8 cup of cider vinegar and let this simmer until the mango was softened and the alcohol had time to burn off (roughly 15 minutes). Using an immersion blender, I pureed this into a thick, spicy, sweet paste. Next, I made a BBQ sauce base of catsup, worcestershire sauce, molasses, brown sugar, and cider vinegar. Once these flavors had come together, I added the mango paste in 1-2 tablespoon increments until the sauce had reached the level of sweetness/spiciness that I was after.

I had seasoned up some chicken thighs and brumsticks with garlic powder and chili powder and grilled them up, slathering on the sauce as the chicken cooked. I served this with a nice clean salad with some pistachios and feta cheese and an ice cold beer.

...And, there you have it:

School starts on Monday, and we've got to go to a department bbq tomorrow, so tonight seemed the best time to have one last, special, summer dinner (well, at least until next week when we have the three-day labor day holiday to contend with). So, at the market today we spied some lamb chops on sale and snapped those up. I'd seen a Bobby Flay recipe online a couple of days ago that looked interesting, and so had an idea of what to do with them.

Now, I think Bobby Flay is a bit of a primadonna pretty boy, but, he does do fantastic things with fruits and different chilis. While I much prefer Jamie Oliver's or Alton Brown's overall cooking styles, I am consistently tempted by Flay's more accessible recipes.


This time around the sauce for the lamb called for dried cherries, cabernet sauvingon, and stems from mint plants. Forutnately, we have no shortage of mint, so this was easy. After reducing the wine and simultaneously rehydrating the cherries, I added some mint leaves and sugar, and a slurry of corn starch. I whacked the lamb chops on a griddle and then topped them with the sauce and a little feta cheese for color. I threw some cous cous together with roasted cherry tomatos and mushrooms and fresh parsley for a side and steamed some corn in water and tarragon vinegar. An accessible shiraz tied it all together (like a nice rug does for a living room...).


Anyway, Mina seemed to like it...

Another Recipe that Turned Out:

I got home a little early on Friday and cooked dinner. We had some leftover andouille sausage and I had been thinking all day about how to use it with some shrimp that I had seen at the store. I suppose the paella I cooked the other day (see a previous post) was still in my mind and I so made some spaghetti with a paella twist.

I steeped some saffron in white wine and sauteed some sliced garlic along with the sliced sausage. I deglazed the pan with the saffron white wine and put in some clams to steam. When the clams opened, I added 1/3 pound of shrimp and some broccoli. Finally, I added the spaghetti, which was just short of al dente, and let it finish cooking in the sautee pan, soaking up the fragrant, very colorful broth. Finally, a little pecorino romano cheese and a mix of chopped herbs (flat leaf parsley, marjoram, and green leaf shiso) went on the top and I served it up.

Simple, full flavors. I really enjoyed this dish and hope you do to.

Paella:

Mina and I were in the mood for seafood this weekend, and so I decided to make some paella. In Japan, I made it from time to time, always taking full advantage of the fresh shellfish and free range chicken that was available there. Over there, I was always disappointed with the chorizo sausage available, but thankfully Syracuse has a decent selection of andoullie and chorizo available.

Anyway, paella, plenty of saffron, some chicken, some shrimp, some mohogany clams from Maine and some andoullie. Yummy. This time I used a Jaime Oliver recipe that eschewed baking for stovetop treatment along the lines of a risotto. Fantastic.

Alongside, I threw together a basil sangria from a recipe in Food & Wine's August issue and for desert we had an apple juice granita from the same magazine. Another fabulous meal. Tomorrow, Gyros a la Alton Brown!

Not the Most Traditional 4th of July Dinner, but...

The weather in Syracuse on the 4th was something less than perfect. It struggled to get to 70 degrees and was cloudy and raining pretty much all day. Somehow it felt more like a perfect late September afternoon for college football than a day for fireworks and barbecues.

I spent part of the morning looking at cookbooks for something that inspired and I decided to go with something from one of my most interesting books. It's called Murakami Recipe and is a Japanese cookbook that contains recipes based on the food prepared in Haruki Murakami's novels and short stories. If you've never read any of his books, I recommend them highly (especially The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase, and Dance, Dance, Dance) and food and jazz are often woven into the narratives. In A Wild Sheep Chase our main character is stuck in a house in Hokkaido with nothing to do but cook and prepares a roast beef. I decided to make a dinner based on that recipe.

We had a boneless roast in the freezer, so I thawed it and prepared a paste of roasted garlic. I got some rosemary and lemon thyme from our herb garden and chopped those up and mixed them with sea salt and black pepper. I rubbed the garlic paste over the top of the roast and coated as much of the outside as I could with the herb mixture. Uncovered areas I seasoned with salt and pepper. The beef went into a 375 degree oven for 40-45 minutes (until the internal temperature of the roast hit 125 degrees). In the meantine I chopped up some zucchini and yellow squash and roasted it with sage, salt and pepper, and prepared some mashed potatoes with cheddar cheese.

The roast came out of the oven and we popped the cork on a nice, if reasonably priced, bottle of Carmenere, a Chilean red. The meat was tender with a nice garlic and herb crust on the top side. An easy recipe with satisfying results.

A Seafood Dinner:




The other night, Mina and I had a nice, relaxing mid-summer seafood dinner at home. We'd done our usual shopping and decided to stop by the best supermarket for fish here in Syracuse (surprisingly, it is Price Chopper, rather than either Wegmans or P&C) where they had Cherrystone Clams and Softshell Crabs on sale.



The Softshell Crabs we coated in seasoned cornmeal and flour and fried, then served with a yuzu scented mayonnaise. These were lovely. The Cherrystones were the star of the show, though, and we steamed them in white wine, some old bay seasoning, and lemon juice. Served with some homemade bread to sop up the broth, there couldn't have been a more satisfying mid-summer seafood dinner. I think it warmed us up for our upcoming anniversary trip to Maine, now only 10 days away.

One thing about living in New York, I guess, is that seafood is just a little bit more reasonably priced here than in Ohio. Coming back from Japan, though, one of the toughest things to adjust to has been the relative difficulty in finding good, reasonably priced fish of various types (of course, when I was in Japan I always had a hard time finding an interesting, reasonable supply of meats). I guess everything is relative. In any event, it was nice to have this lovely seafood dinner at home with Mina.