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Risotto, the food of the gods

Today I made risotto so good I could not believe that I had made it. It was an epiphany.

I know, I know, George already posted a risotto recipe, and mine is not that different from his, but it’s simpler, and has things in it I like. So there.

Risotto

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 cups arborio rice
  • 6 cups liquid*
  • 2 tbsp. olive oil or butter
  • 1/2 cup parmesan cheese
  • extra things: mushrooms (about a cup, white and crimini), spinach (a couple handfuls, chopped), blue cheese (a couple tablespoons) in this case
  • salt and pepper to taste

* You need about four times as much liquid as rice. I split mine up like this: 4 cups vegetable broth; 1 cup water; 1 cup wine. I’ve seen recipes that suggest only 1/2 a cup of wine, and all the rest broth… the main reason I put water in is because the easy-to-buy container of broth only has four cups in it. You could also, obviously, use chicken broth.

Directions

  1. Heat up/melt the olive oil or butter in a big pot. Add rice and stir until coated.
  2. If you’re using wine, add it now. Stir constantly until it’s mostly absorbed.
  3. Meanwhile, cook the mushrooms and spinach separately.
  4. Add the rest of the liquid about 1/2 cup at a time, waiting for each batch to be absorbed before you add more, stirring stirring stirring as you go. The rice should be
  5. Mix in the mushrooms and spinach, stir around, cook for another couple of minutes.
  6. Add the blue cheese and parmesan cheese and stir until melted. Add salt and pepper if you want them.

This recipe is deceptively simple. The drawback of amazing risotto is that it takes about an hour of constant stirring and pouring.

White Vegetarian Chili

Veggie Chili

I have been trying to cut down on meat lately for health reasons, which will go one of two ways as far as you all are concerned:

  1. Lots of yummy vegetarian recipes posted here!
  2. I become lazy and eat a lot of peanut butter and jelly.

So far I’m still being relatively un-lazy, so I modified my mom’s White Chicken Chili to be veggie-ful. I love white chili because I’m not a big fan of tomato sauce, onions, or peppers, all of which are usually heavily present in traditional chilis. This chili is spicy but light, and as soon as I eat up a batch I want MORE.

Ingredients:

  • 30-40 oz. vegetable broth (or chicken broth, if it’s easier to find and you don’t care about the “vegetarian” part)
  • 4 cans white beans — I recommend Cannellini or Great Northern — or the equivalent of dry beans
  • 1 can red or pink kidney beans, or the equivalent of dry beans
  • ~1 cup fresh green beans, chopped into 1″ pieces
  • ~1 1/2 cup fresh white mushrooms, chopped into quarters
  • 2 tsp. cumin
  • 1 tsp. ground cayenne
  • 1 tsp. oregano
  • 1/2 tsp. ground cloves
  • salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

  1. Pour the broth and all the beans into a big pot (don’t forget to drain the beans to reduce sodium, and rinse them to reduce it even more), and simmer over medium heat for about an hour, stirring occasionally. The broth will get thicker.
  2. Add vegetables, and cook until they’re beginning to get soft.
  3. Add spices, and cook for about another half hour.
  4. Serve plain or over rice. Excellent with Monterey Jack or cheddar (or both) cheese sprinkled over top, if you swing that way.

Veggie Chili

beefs

In case you were wondering, Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon IS that complicated. Spelling it right is, too. Kim and I set out to recreate this epic dish and, even starting as a two-person team, it was still about a six-hour process. I also don’t know how Amy Adams had time to fall asleep, because there was no point at which I got to stop doing things. On the other hand, it was awesome.

You can find a pretty good transcript of the recipe here (but not quite complete, annoyingly), if you don’t have the cookbook. Note that you will also need her instructions on sauteing mushrooms (this one is a direct, complete copy) and brown-braising pearl onions (close enough), even if you think you know how to do these things.

Some notes:

  • One of the best things about the original recipe is the detailed information on wine. It recommends pairing with “a fairly full-bodied, young red wine, such as Beaujolais, Côtes du Rhône, Bordeaux-St. Émilion, or Burgundy,” and using any of those or a Chianti to go into the stew.
  • 3 cups of wine = 1 bottle. I doubled the recipe. Whoo!
  • I bought pre-cut-up stew meat, some of which was cut a lot finer than the other, and on the whole big chunks worked a lot better for drying and browning.
  • Conversely, I couldn’t find an unsliced chunk of bacon anywhere, and regular old thick-sliced seemed to work okay.
  • I over-salted because I forgot, as always, to account for the massive amounts of salt in bouillon cubes. :( Use caution, or perhaps better beef stock.
  • Blanching helps when you realize you have to peel 48 pearl onions.
  • I couldn’t really get the sauce to thicken in the end, but it seemed to end up okay just letting it reduce a lot even if it never really reached light-spoon-coating consistency. =/

For extras, here is the rosemary bread recipe I have been fussing with of late. It’s sort of long but that’s because the procedure is the complicated part; sorry. Start this ~3 hrs before you want to eat it.

  • 2 1/2 tsp yeast, which is~1 packet
  • 2 c. warm water, ~110-115 F, which is warm but just shy of scalding
  • 1 Tbsp sugar
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 4 c. flour. Bread flour is nice if you can get it, and if you do not consider extra gluten cheating.
  • 2 tsp. minced fresh rosemary plus more for topping. Fresh is important! You can sub out some for fresh thyme.
  • olive oil, corn meal, sea salt

Dissolve yeast in the warm water and sugar. If it’s NOT instant/fast-acting/bread-machine yeast, give it <5 min to froth up. Otherwise, immediately add flour, salt, and 2 tsp rosemary and stir until blended. Do not knead! Cover and let rise for 1 hour or until double in size; bonus points for putting it someplace slightly warm and moist.

Oil a baking sheet and sprinkle with corn meal. Perhaps try oiling your hands instead of flouring them, as the dough is super sticky, then divide it in half, shape each half quickly and loosely into a round by tucking the edges under, and place on the baking sheet. Cover and let rise another hour. The stickiness is again a problem; cooking-sprayed plastic wrap is the only thing I’ve managed to use that DIDN’T stick horribly and make the top of my loaves lumpy.

With bread, some last-minute rising happens in the oven and for that you want things hot and steamy (har). Start heating your oven early, maybe half an hour into the second rise, to 450 or “lots.” My oven here has no numbers on the dial between 350 and 500 so I use my imagination, but I don’t think getting it too hot is a possibility. If you have a pizza stone, put it in now. Also put a cast-iron skillet in the bottom of the oven (or something else which can be raised to high temps empty, then have cool water thrown in it without exploding).

When bread is again about doubled in size, brush with olive oil and top with more rosemary and plentiful crushed sea salt. Get yourself some water, maybe 1/4 cup, on hand near your oven as now you must act quickly! Put the bread in (just stick the pan on the pizza stone if using one, unless you want to get fancy and try to slide the bread onto the stone directly), dump the water on your previously-heated skillet or whatever where it will send up exciting clouds of steam, and close the oven door quickly. Bake 10 min, adding more water for steam if it runs out. Then turn the oven down to 375 and bake another 20 min or so until it’s golden-browny.

Taiwan Day 1: Orange Shabu

I couldn’t decide between two openers for this post, so this is now a choose your own adventure blog.

OPTION 1:
I think it would be easy to reduce crime if you told people that heaven were like dining at Orange Shabu.

OPTION 2:
I HAVE HAD WAGYU BEEF SHABU SHABU: BEHOLD MY WORKS YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR.

SO GOOD

SO GOOD

A few blocks away from Taipei 101, this place is a chic Japanese take on traditional Chinese hot pot. The receptacle was a copper pot heated over a gas stove in the center of each table. Tables were separated by linen blinds. While I’m not entirely sure I am even qualified to list all of the stuff that went into the hot pot, a couple of things stand out.

  • Oh my god wagyu beef. Soooo delicious.
  • We had a special kind of pork, but the language barrier prevented me from understanding what made it special. It was served with a creamy sesame sauce, though, and that was phenomenal.
  • Fresh shrimp and fish balls made by plopping the raw materials straight into the hot pot out of a piece of bamboo.
  • We were served a special kind of tea, which tasted kind of like echinacea, but gentle and not medicinal. Its intention was to cool the body down after the hot pot.
  • The almond tofu was like no almond tofu I’ve ever had. It was still silky and delicious, but held together much more firmly than almond tofu from a box.
  • Instead of putting cellophane noodles into the broth at the end of the meal, they made it into porridge. Who was too fat to eat a lot of the porridge? This kid. However, we reserved a ton for breakfast tomorrow.

I was treated to hot pot because my aunt insisted that I should go easy on the greasy disaster on day one. Taiwanese food is less flavorful and more gentle than mainland Chinese food–she was worried that the broth would be too light for my boorish American taste buds. However, the broth we made (using, among the other ingredients, a combination of napa and white cabbage) was aromatic and complex, and made an excellent porridge at the end of the meal.

Tomorrow: the adventures of Chinese barbequed sea cucumber, aka, Jo’s most favoritest dish in the world.

Lunch bonus!: Taiwanese beef bourgignon is not nearly as good as Sophiese beef bourgignon.

Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes

N.B.: I make this all the time and we have no photo documentation of it because it gets eaten real fast. I have supplemented with an artist’s interpretations of what the potatoes are like.

Ingredients:

  • Potatoes (yukon golds are best)
  • Whipping cream
  • Butter
  • salt to taste
  • 1-2 bulbs of garlic
  • olive oil

Gloria will tell you that I am a measure-twice-cut-once kind of cook. I am very careful with quantities, and I don’t improvise very well. This is the one exception, so I’ll go over quantity pretty carefully.

HOW MANY POTATOES?
It’s hard sometimes to gauge how many potatoes you need. You really need to judge what the rest of the meal is like and how fat your diners are.

They are all different sizes. Fuck you.

They are all different sizes! Fuck you!

I usually go for around half a pound of potatoes per person, if you have time to measure. If you don’t, about four people is four potatoes that you’d chuck to ward off a medium-persistent robber.

Step 1. Roast some garlic. I think we’ve gone over this in an earlier post, so here is an MS Paint synopsis:

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU--

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUU--

Step 2. Boil potatoes. I usually cut the potatoes into 2″x2″x1″ cubes, but it’s not an exact science. Gloria likes it when I leave the skins on, so I am lazy and leave the skins on. Boil them until they cut like butter with a fork.

Step 3. When your potatoes are soft enough, drain them really well, then put them in a mixing bowl. Drop 1/2 a stick of butter in there for around 4 potatoes. (Actually, regardless of how many potatoes I use, there’s usually a 1/2 stick of butter in it.)

Step 4. While the butter is melting, retrieve your roasted garlic and pop the soft cloves out of their pods. Put them into the mixing bowl with everything else.

Step 5. Take an egg beater to your potatoes, low speed. While the eggbeater is going, pour some whipping cream in. Usually I use anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 cup, but it really depends on the texture you want. We used 1/4 cup for about 3.5 pounds of potatoes last week, and it made a smooth, dense mashed potato.

Step 6. Season. You want to use some salt, definitely, but it’s at your discretion. I love throwing some pepper into mine, and maybe some Lawry’s seasoned salt. But if you’ve got only one bulb of garlic in there, less intense flavors are necessary. Remember, the base is creamy and buttery.

MONEY SHOT

It does.

As in “happy as a”

Here are some facts about clams:

  • They are delicious! While they steam they emit this stunningly tasty broth. Look into it.
  • They are cheap, esp. for seafood! $5/lb is the price for Manila clams down at the Berkeley Bowl, and that is definitely enough to feed two people.
  • When you buy them… they are STILL ALIVE. Creepy, eh?

This is a very simple and traditional way to prepare them, and the most expensive part is the bottle of wine, of which only about 1/2 cup goes into the cooking… so you get to drink the remainder with dinner! Serves you + 1 fly honey.

Linguini with clams (basic)

  • 1 lb small clams, such as Manilla or Littleneck (this should be about 2 dozen and a bit)
  • fat (butter or oil), about 3-4 tablespoons
  • 3 large cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 small shallot (or 1/4 of a mild-tasting onion), minced
  • 1/2 cup dry white wine (Kendall Jackson’s sauvignon blanc is a very good choice here and it’s inexpensive too)
  • 2 tomatoes, peeled, cored, seeded, and diced
  • 1/2 lb linguini

Melt the fat in a large pot on medium, add the minced garlic and shallot and sauté until fragrant and beginning to soften (about 2 minutes). Add the clams to the pot, the wine, and about half the diced tomatoes. Bring to a boil, then cover and let steam until the clams open (about 5-8 minutes). Meanwhile, cook the linguini to your desired specifications. Remove clams to a bowl (discarding any that do not open… that means they were dead when you got them :/) and cover with foil. Drain the linguini and throw it in the pot, which should have a nice thin layer of broth at the bottom. Throw in the remaining tomato and toss it all together over medium heat for a few beats. Serve the linguini with clams on top (either you can remove them from their shells or the diner can… your choice!) immediately.

This recipe of course begs for additions and variation. I was planning on tossing some arugula in as well, but my stock had gone extra-bitter so I decided against it. I also added some grated chestnuts as an experiment, but I do not recommend this, as chestnuts are a pain in the ass to prepare and they didn’t add much to the dish.


For dessert, Lisa (my guinea pig) and I had little individual bread puddings. I used the spiced poaching liquid from my last post, then combined that with 2 lightly beaten eggs. The loaf of good sliced white bread I had bought on Thursday was just starting to stale, and so I de-crusted and cubed three slices of that, soaked it in the egg mixture, and then baked it in two ramekins at 350˚F for about half an hour (you want the pudding to set, but aside from that the cooking time is really up to you). Voilà: stress-free dessert!

Café Zuni chicken dinner and poached pears

The other day I made my very first “real” chicken dinner. I had been meaning to try this recipe for roast chicken, but I didn’t want it to suck and then leave my three roommates hungry. They’re all back in snowy Virginia now, so I thought it would be a good time to try.

The recipe is from Café Zuni, which is just over the bay, but it’s a pretty expensive joint, and doing it yourself is not too hard. Smitten Kitchen’s summary (which is what I linked above) suffices here, except I will make the following notes: (1) I only had 10 hours to salt the chicken, though 1-3 days is the recommended salting time (it still turned out quite good and I’ll do it right when I inevitably repeat this recipe someday). (2) It was very difficult to find a chicken quite small enough. To be fair, I only had time to look in one store (see the first note) but I went to Andronico’s which has fairly good meat selection. I managed to find a 3.68 pound free-range chicken, so that’s what I used. (3) Once in the oven (which you start at a whopping 475˚F) the chicken was very good at hissing and spitting and getting chicken fat all over the oven’s heating coil (oh how I wish we had a gas range) which led to a lot of smoke; long story short I ended up removing the batteries from our smoke detector.

ChxAs you can see, I served it with the bread salad (recipe also in the above link). For dessert, Brandon (my guinea pig for this dinner) and I had poached pears, also a first!

Pears poached in spiced vin santo

  • 2 small pears (pref. d’Anjou) peeled, but not cored or stemmed
  • 1 750 mL bottle of Italian dessert wine such as vin santo or marsala
  • 1/2 cup of water
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 cinnamon stick, broken in two (this is harder than it sounds to do)
  • 1 tbsp vanilla bean paste (or a real vanilla bean)
  • 1/2 inch ginger root, peeled and finely chopped
  • for serving: whipped cream or 1/2 cup mascarpone cheese, honey and powdered cinnamon to taste

Combine the wine, water, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and ginger in the smallest (but still deep) saucepan you can find. Bring to a boil on medium, then reduce to right below a simmer and add the pears (position them so that the liquid covers as much of the pear as possible). Cook for 20-30 minutes or until tender (so that it yields to a fork), rotating them occasionally so that they pears poach evenly. Once they are soft, remove the pears to a serving dish and reduce the remaining poaching liquid by half. Serve the pears standing up (you might have to slice off the bottom to make them stand) covered with the poaching liquid/syrup (strained, of course), and with a small dollop of whipped cream or honeyed mascarpone.

Anyway, now I have a leftover chicken carcass and poaching liquid. Probably I will turn the chicken into chicken stock and also chicken-and-barley stew. The poaching liquid will probably get added to hot apple cider to create INSTANT HOLIDAY CHEER. Science!

Merry Christmas cookies

Christmas cookies in my family are serious business. My grandmother, my mother, and now I have been making the same cookies, with more or less the same decorations, every year since 1947. The recipe is from Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book, but doubled because why would you make fewer than this many?

Cookie baking

Ingredients

  • 2/3 cup shortening
  • 2/3 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 1/3 cups honey
  • 2 tsp. lemon flavoring
  • 5 ¼ cups flour
  • 2 tsp. baking soda
  • 2 tsp. salt

Cooking baking

Directions

  1. Mix shortening, sugar, egg, honey and flavoring thoroughly. Measure flour and stir together with baking soda and salt. Blend in. Chill dough.
  2. Heat oven to 375o. Roll dough out ¼” thick. Cut into desired shapes.
  3. Place 1″ apart on lightly greased baking sheet. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until no imprint remains when touched lightly.
  4. When cool, ice and decorate as desired.

Cookie baking

You can’t really see under the Santas here, but this year I debuted some new Hanukkah shapes as well: a menorah and a dreidel. We’ve also been making Stars of David for a while. Cookies for everyone!

You can make a ginger bread version by substituting brown sugar for granulated, molasses for honey, and 2 tsp. cinnamon plus 1 tsp. ginger for lemon flavoring.

Cookie bakingI stole this tin from my mom because I thought it was pretty.

Next up: THE DECORATENING.

Beer Battered Fish

Sometimes you just want something fried in delicious oil.  That is how I felt last night when deciding on how to make dinner without having to go get more ingredients from the store.  Luckily, I had some frozen fish (the basa swai variety), flour (that Jo had spilled yeast into, but it makes no difference here!), beer (Blue Moon from months ago), lemons, and butter (that we NEVER RUN OUT OF).  All of these things came together in harmony, thanks to some quick searching on the Food Network site.

I took the instructions from this recipe, and because of my limited pantry I just threw together a lemon butter sauce by melting butter in a small pan, adding a bunch of lemon zest, and cooking it for a few minutes.

It’s super easy, and hard to mess up! A+!

Beer Battered Fish (serves 4)

3/4 cup all-purpose flour, divided
2/3 cup beer
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
4 tilapia or flounder fillets, about 5 ounces each
Salt
  • 3/4 cup all-purpose flour, divided
  • 2/3 cup beer
  • 1 egg, lightly beaten
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 4 tilapia or flounder fillets, about 5 ounces each

Heat enough olive oil, to shallow fry the fish, in a large skillet over medium-high heat.

In a shallow dish, whisk together 1/2 cup of the flour, beer, egg, and baking powder. Remember to do this methodically, because if you just dump the beer in there it will foam up and spill over into a nasty mess on your counter.

Place remaining 1/4 cup flour in a separate shallow dish.

Season both sides of fish fillets with salt and black pepper. Dredge fish in flour, turn to coat both sides and then shake off excess flour. Dunk fish in beer mixture and turn to coat both sides.

Add fish to hot oil and cook 2 to 3 minutes per side, until cooked through and opaque. Remove fish from oil. Place on a paper towel lined plate.

There are a lot of beer battered fish recipes out there, so I recommend trying a variety of them! Report back on the results as well so I can try them. :)

Some links to get you started:

Homemade Beer Battered Fish and Chips (the classic! This blog post gives lots of good basic tips.)

Beer and Chipotle-Battered Fish Tacos

Beer Battered Fish Tacos with Baja Sauce

Restaurant Review: Cafe Atlantico

UPDATE: A day after I posted this, the chef who runs the whole Zaytinya/Cafe Atlantico network gets nominated as GQ’s Chef of the Year! If that’s not a(n a)rousing endorsement, I don’t know what is.

Warning: There are no photographs in this review for three very important reasons.

  1. The lighting was low and romantic.
  2. No room in my classy purse for a camera anyhow.
  3. Totally distracted by a boy who was both adorable and treating me, so it would’ve been maximum rude. (I am looking at you, Miss Wright.)

Given Mike Isabella’s notoriety and recent booting off of Top Chef to return to his delectable hunting grounds of Zaytinya in DC (one of my personal favorite restaurants), it is understandable that even several days in advance, their reservation-friendly tables were packed until 10:30. So after that failure, I forfeited my restaurant-choosing duties to the person who would be paying for it, and he selected a restaurant owned by the same conglomerate, Cafe Atlantico. Words cannot describe how much happier your life will be after going to this upscale casual neuvo latino eatery. But they’ll try their damnedest.

Drinks

Do yourself a favor and get them. Not off the wine list–go for their signature cocktails. Their mixologist is some kind of genius. I had a special for the night, the Mississippi Manhattan, which as far as I can remember included Maker’s Mark whiskey, meyer lemon juice, and tupelo honey syrup. The server actually lit a bit of lemon zest oil on fire before dropping the zest into my drink. I was in love by then. When I tasted this divine, unintimidating lemonade, I was in love forever, with a passion that only Bella and Edward can truly understand.

Kyle got a Salt and Lime Air Margarita, which was a normal margarita with light salt and lime foam on top. You think it wouldn’t make too much of a difference, but all of that divine lime taste and just the interesting texture of the drink made it tears-of-joy-inducing. Oh, I also hear that their mojitos are the best in town, so that’s something else to keep in mind.

Guacamole

Everyone and their mother will tell you: Jo is not an avocado person. I try to avoid it in sushi. I definitely try to avoid it in my Mexican food. I’ve had two good guacs before in my life, and I’m telling you now that this is one of them.

They’re made tableside in a stoneware bowl with just two wooden spoons. First the server asks how hot you’d like it (we went for medium and I barely tasted the heat). Then he rubs the bowl down with lime and puts in some diced onion, peppers, and other stuff I couldn’t see due to the aforementioned dim lighting and distraction. Then he just takes three avocado halves, drops them in, and mashes away. No mayo, no nothin’. I was completely stunned, especially when the bowl was handed to me and I swooned at the taste of it. Sometimes, all it really takes is the right combination of fresh ingredients–don’t let no one tell you different.

I ordered an appetizer (scallops and squid with puffed coconut rice), and while it was cooked perfectly, the thought of it was totally trumped by…

My Entree, the Best Entree Ever

Kyle got a skirt steak, which was a perfectly delicious skirt steak and I will not fault him on it.

I got the duck confit, which was served with parsnips, dried cherries, fresh herbs, almonds, and horseradish yogurt. The parsnips were sliced long and thin and looked like fettuccine, and they were served tossed with a bunch of fresh parsley. But the duck… oh my good lord the duck. The meat flaked on my fork like fish meat, and I just pulled it off and ate it like that. The skin had the dried cherries on it, adding a little tartness, but was otherwise lightly glazed with sugar. The sweet burst of fatty skin plus the perfectly brined duck just exploded in your mouth with just completely overwhelming levels of flavor.

I was entirely undone as a human being.

Dessert

We got quince sorbet with rosemary in it, and it was good. But not as good as that duck.

Cafe Atlantico: go there, but bring your smelling salts, because I guarantee if you pick the right things off the menu, it will give you the vapors for certain.