om nom nom

A Brand New Coffee Paradigm

Jophine — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:55:59 +0000

Sorry, non-coffee folks. This one is not for you.

Gloria got me an Aerobie Aeropress coffee maker for my birthday, and after spending a very productive weekend with it, I think it’s the best $25 that’s ever been spent on me. While I would never go so far as to call myself a coffee snob, I can tell you with all certainty that, even with the hastily-bought Starbucks grounds that I used, this is the best coffee I’ve ever had.

For information on how the Aeropress works, you can take a look at this video; I’m not sure I could do it any better than that.

Instead, I have endorsements for you, in the form of dialogue:

Me: “Hey Donna, try this coffee.”
Donna: “Well, it’s better than most drip coffee I have. I can’t even drink that Starbucks crap anymore.”
Me: “… this is Starbucks.”
Donna: “What?”

Me: “Hey Jeanna, try this coffee.”
Jeanna: Five minutes later: “… I bought the press.”

Gabe : “Actually, this is tolerable.”

Try it!

Oyster Stew

Spanky — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:08:28 +0000

So I got a sealed jar of oysters at Great Wall supermarket since I didn’t want to get a whole bunch of oysters and shuck them myself. I was a little nervous since I don’t generally like oysters quite as much as clams. It turns out they’re easy to sustainably farm, so I suppose it’s about time I get more more recipes… you know, besides deep frying them. This recipe is pretty simple and good, though it’s obviously not a stew, since the oysters have to cook for only a few minutes.

The recipe, from Allrecipe, with my modifications:

1/2 cup butter
1 cup minced celery
3 tablespoons minced shallots
1/4 cup cognac/brandy/sherry
1 quart half-and-half cream
2 (12 ounce) containers fresh shucked oysters, undrained
salt and ground black pepper to taste
1 pinch cayenne pepper, or to taste (I put way more than a pinch in)

Basically, melt the butter on medium, add the minced shallots and celery, cook until those are soft and fragrant, and add the brandy, and let that reduce for a bit. Then, add the half-and-half, and gently bring that to a low boil. Next is the seasoning, and dump the oysters in with the liquid, and cook for only a few minutes until the edges curl, which should take barely a few minutes. I also added a dash of Worcestershire sauce for extra umami, and the flavor turned out pretty well.

Pão de queijo (Brazilian cheesebread)

George — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:21:29 +0000

Last night for dinner I attempted to make those cheesebreads we get at Chima (the Brazilian steakhouse in Tysons). Whenever I go to Chima I have often wondered (as I gorge myself on cheesebreads and roasted leg o’ lamb) how these wonderful little things are made (are they essentially soufflés? is it dark magic?). The answer is “tapioca flour.”

The recipe I used couldn’t be simpler: Preheat your oven to 400 degrees, grease a mini-muffin tin (we only had a muffin tin; this works too, though your cheesebreads will come out “larger and in charger”). Then in a blender, blend the following until very smooth:

1 egg
1/3 cup olive oil (not too strong tasting, but use your own taste!)
2/3 cup milk (I used skim and everything was fine)
a scant 1 1/2 cups tapioca flour
1/2 cup grated cheese of your choice (I used as the recipe recommends, a Mexican queso fresco, but I imagine other things are good too)
1 tsp salt
other herbs/spices you might want in your cheesebread such as thyme, oregano, or red chili flakes!

Pour the resulting batter into your muffin tins about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way up, then pop them in the oven. They will get EXTREMELY POOFY. You should take them out after they look nice and golden brown (this took me somewhere between 18-25 minutes?). Cool them on racks and eat them once they’re cool enough to touch… or immediately—steam burns be damned! The texture is just what you remember from Chima: toothsome on the outside, almost mochi-like on the inside.

N.B. If you’re the type of guy or gal who tastes batter even if there’s raw egg in it (such as myself), you may think the batter is somewhat salty. Do not be alarmed: the salt is much less concentrated in the final product.

Served it up with flank steak rubbed with salt, pepper, minced garlic, and olive oil, then broiled on each side until there was no pink on the surface of the meat. The meat rested while I baked the cheesebreads, and it came out somewhere between medium and medium-rare. Juicy and delicious! :3 Michael took a picture of our “Brazilian Steakhouse Night” plates but I do not have it.

Chicken and Fruity Goop

Q. R. Murphy — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 05:00:56 +0000

Luscious.

Hi all, here is a recipe I made up somewhat on the fly recently, using a Googled recipe for some Carribean fruit-covered chicken as a foundation. My measurements will not be exact, as I more or less tossed shit in the sauce and kept tasting until it tasted the way I wanted. It ended up really awesomely.

Though not this awesomely.

This recipe comes in two parts: the chicken and the fruity goo you coat the chicken in. Let’s get started!

The Chicken

Ingredients:

Chicken (pounded somewhat flat. Not super thin, but you want the pieces to be of mostly uniform thickness)
Flour
Salt
Pepper
White Pepper
Garlic or Onion Powder
1 Egg
Oil of any sort

Unsurprisingly, you’ll be using the flour to make a dredge for the chicken. Pour some in a mixing bowl, then add in the salt, pepper, and other spices to taste. Feel free to experiment: I added some smoked paprika and chili powder to nice effect. Ground mustard can be nice too. Mix up your coating.

Next, break an egg into a deep bowl and whisk it until it is smoooooth like butter. Depending on the amount of chicken you are using, add more eggs as needed.

Take each chicken piece, and dredge it through the flour, then the egg coating, and then the flour again. As you do this, allow about 4 tablespoons or so of your chosen oil heat up in a wok or wok-like structure. Once it is nice and hot and you are finished dredging your chicken, toss the meat in the oil. Yes, you’re doing some quick frying. It won’t take very long, depending on how thin you pounded your chicken. Keep poking the meat with a fork, and when your fork slides in and out cleanly, take the meat off the heat. If you want to be more sure, then slice the chicken in half when you think it is done. You want to take the chicken off when the middle has just the barest hint of pink, as once you take it off, the absorbed heat will cook it the rest of the way. Any later, and the chicken will overcook itself.

You did it!

Meanwhile, this guy won the World Series after his rock gig. Feel free to feel bad.

Goop de Froot

Ingredients:

2/3 cup some sort of fruit paste or jelly. Not the stuff from a jar that is sugar and artificial flavoring, some honest-to-God fruit baste in pseudo-bar form. I used guava paste, but I am confident some other fruit selections would work just as well
2 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons vinegar (of choice: I used rice wine vinegar this time and plain vinegar another and both worked fine. Choose your favorite vinegar flavor)
1-2 cloves of garlic
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup water

The measurements are baselines, upon tasting during the cooking process add more of whichever flavors you need.

In a saucepan, combine the water, jelly, soy sauce, and vinegar and bring to a boil. Stir and make sure the jelly breaks down and incorporates into everything else. When it reaches a boil, lower heat and simmer 2 minutes.

Mix 1-2 tablespoons of cornstarch into 2 tablespoons water. Check your sauce’s consistency. If it is too watery, add small amounts of your cornstarch/water mixture and stir until the desired thickness is obtained.

Saute chopped garlic in your wok, and when it is nicely browned add your whole thickened sauce to it. Add your chicken pieces and cover thoroughly, mix, and then pull chicken out onto a plate. Serve with rice, veggies, whatever you like. Enjoy it thoroughly, for given the chance, the chickens will do the same.

To be fair, it looks like a delicious baby.

Curried Butternut Squash Soup

Nattie — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 07:21:25 +0000

FIRST POST! HI EVERYBODY!

Okay, lameness over, if you’ve been following my tweets, to soothe my angst over student loans and photography, I’ve been throwing myself into making lots of food. Gloria reminded me of this blog’s existence, and today I’ll share with you a pretty simple curried butternut squash soup that I thought up while eating a different, inferior, store-bought squash soup.

What you’ll need:
Blender or Food Processor
Pot for soup.

Butternut Squash – medium sized, ours yielded about 4 cups of inner meat, but James ate a lot before I started making this.
1 medium onion – I used red because of what’s on hand, but up to you!
1 tbsp unsalted butter – OR all the butter you want in the world.
3 cloves garlic – confession, I used more, but I’m a garlic addict. Spice to taste.
1.5 teaspoons curry powder – again, I used 1 tbsp, but not everyone is as spice dead as me.
3 cups chicken broth – Vegetable broth okay.
Salt and pepper to taste.

Optional: Heavy cream for fancy spiral topping.

First things first, you have to roast the butternut squash. Cut that sucker in half lengthwise, scoop out the seeds, put it on a baking sheet face down and stick it in the oven heated to 400 degrees. After about 20-25 minutes, it should be done. Check on it occasionally. You’ll know it’s done when the outer skin is easily pierced by a fork.

Alternatively, you can cut the squash into quarters, put it on a plate, cover it all with saran wrap, and microwave it on high for 6 minute intervals until done. I vastly prefer baking, but James did it the microwave method, before swearing “NEVER AGAIN.” Now, that’s a resounding success if I’ve ever heard one.

After taking the squash out of the oven and setting it aside to cool, you can chop up your onion and garlic, and start frying up the onion in your butter. I just used a regular stainless steel pot that I knew would hold all my ingredients. When the onion starts looking translucent and yummily cooked, put in the garlic, chicken broth, and curry powder and start bringing it up to a simmer.

As that happily gets up to a warm bubbling, turn back to your squash. If you haven’t already removed it from the oven for whatever reason, do so, and prepare to scald your fingers. Now, remove the inside “meat” of the squash from its skin and put that meat into the soup on the stove. If you’ve baked it properly, the meat usually just falls off and it’s quite easy to separate the two. If you find yourself having some trouble, I use an ice cream scoop to get every little bit I can out of the rinds. You should have a yield of about 3-4 cups of squash meat.

Once all the squash meat is in your pot, you should now have all the ingredients heating on the stove – butternut squash meat, butter, onion, garlic, curry powder, and chicken broth. Bring this up to a nice bubbling simmer and let it sit for about 30 minutes. I check on mine and stir it around every 10 minutes, but whatever you feel comfortable with as long as it’s not on fire.

After 30 minutes, pour the mixture into your food processor or blender and blend until smooth. Salt and pepper it to your taste, or add more garlic/curry powder if you want, and tada! Delicious soup! Because I was trying to be fancy and had heavy cream lying around, I put a cream spiral on top of the soup I was serving, but this is completely optional. Highly recommended for those with steadier hands than me, though!

Lamb Kapama

Ben — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:53:36 +0000

This is a dish I first had at Cava Mezze where it is absolutely to die for; it is also pretty good at Plaka Grill.

The finished dish

Recipe-googling produced quite a few variations on the basic idea (lamb stewed in a rich tomato sauce) but I wanted it like I’d had it in the restaurants: with orzo. The recipe I judged most credible came from Shaboom’s Kitchen; you can see it here.

I substituted lamb shanks for slices of leg of lamb. Lamb shanks are one of the toughest cuts and must be stewed for a while to become tender; the recipe calls for two hours of stewing and that was plenty to get the meat falling off the bone. Shanks also produce lots of gelatin as the connective tissues render out; I thought this added to the texture.

After you stew them, the meat just falls off...

There were two more very important deviations from the recipe. First, I added the orzo to the dutch oven after stripping the meat from the shanks, as pasta absorbing sauce = good. Second, I grated up some parrano (“The Dutch cheese that thinks it’s Italian”) and sprinkled it over top of our bowls. Delicious.

Regrets: the 1/8th teaspoon of cinnamon is probably not enough, at least with the pre-ground cinnamon I used. The undeniable hint of cinnamon is part of what makes this dish so distinctively delicious. I’ll be honest though, it was really good even without a noticeable amount of cinnamon.

Did I mention that this dish is really easy? Aside from the fact that it takes two hours of stewing (which takes no attention at all) and using my cast iron skillet for browning the shanks (guess who’s getting a bigger dutch oven for Christmas?) this is an extremely simple dish that only takes a cutting board, a dutch oven, a plate to rest the browned meat on, and a pot and strainer for the orzo.

I am definitely making this one again– it’s so delicious, it is now one of my main reasons for going to the restaurants I listed above. Go test drive it at one of those and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Gloria — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:37:08 +0000

Ewwwwwww, brussel sprouts are gross!!

Why do brussels sprouts have such a bad rap? Is it because they, unlike spinach, never had a Popeye-like character to extol their virtues to the public? I have so much love for brussels sprouts, but when I offer to bring them over people generally look at me blankly or make a face. However, most people change their minds once they taste this delicious recipe that, in its simplest form, only has a few steps:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Cut the stems off brussels sprouts and then cut them in half. Spread on baking sheet.

Drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper.

Pop into the oven for 30-40 minutes.

This is truly the simplest way to prepare brussels sprouts and the easiest way to make them delicious. Once you’ve mastered this (which won’t take long), then you can get creative! Some of my favorite ways to add a little extra:

Cook several slices of bacon (I usually do about 5 slices per pound of sprouts) until almost done – before you would consider it ready for eating straing. Use kitchen shears to cut up into bits, and pour the bacon bits and all of the rendered fat from the pan onto the brussels sprouts. Make sure the fat is spread evenly, and supplement with olive oil if needed. Roast until delicious.
Throw some chopped pecans in with the sprouts.
Get those bags of shelled, pre-cooked chesnuts, chop into halves, and roast them alongside the sprouts.
Put the sprouts in a cast iron skillet instead of a baking sheet, add butter, garlic, cheese, herbs, and anything else your heart desires.
For people with a sweet tooth, try with some honey on top. Here’s a great recipe!

Now these are just some variations I’ve tried or thought about trying, but really – you can’t go wrong. As for cooking method, I enjoy roasting the best, but you can also boil them. However, I think that it’s much easier to over or undercook when boiling – just be careful!

You want some photos? Kalyn’s Kitchen has a nice recipe with awesome photos.

As for portioning, I’ve found that a pound of brussels sprouts will generally feed about 3-4 people with generous portions.

Sausage, Potato, and Kale Soup

Spanky — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 04:30:55 +0000

Before I forget, I wanted to mention that I made this soup from Pioneer Woman, the Sausage, Potato, and Kale Soup, which is apparently a copycat recipe from Olive Garden, which I haven’t been to in about 10 years or so. But I have to say, if their food is like this, I should probably make the trip. As she says, this recipe makes a hearty soup that’s perfect for cold weather, plus I always love the elegance of a meal that provides a protein, carb, fat, and leafy vegetables all in one. Check out the vitamin content for kale sometime: it’s a little absurd.

So I halved the recipe shown to get something more like 4-5 servings of soup, and it turned out pretty well. I did cook the potatoes beforehand like she did, and I just took a potato masher and mashed up some of the potatoes as well to thicken it. Towards the end, I took a teaspoon or so of cornstarch, and mixed it in a small bowl with a ladle of the broth, then mixed that paste back in to thicken slightly. The soup had a great flavor with the mild spices from the sweet Italian sausage, and the potatoes adding a hint of potato chowder. Don’t be afraid of the whole milk and half-and-half– it’s diluted with the chicken broth anyhow, and the result is nowhere near as thick and heavy as a restaurant chowder, but is still very satisfying. I expect I’ll be making this a lot in the coming months.

Sandwich bread: take two

Ellen — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:32:41 +0000

Well then. On only my second try, I’m pretty happy with my white sandwich bread. It’ll soon be time to branch out. This time I got a lighter, fluffier, still delicious loaf; still on the short side, but if I make more dough that should solve that problem.

Here’s what I did:

Decreased flour a bit. The recipe I quoted last time called for three and a half cups of flour, but I added a bit more to make the dough firmer. This time I did not add a teaspoon about three and a half cups, which made for a sticky and difficult-to-work with dough, but it seems to have worked.
Let it rise longer. In this particular case, I let it rise in the fridge for about ten hours, then out of the fridge for another hour. After I shaped it into a loaf, it was another hour and a half before it reached the top of the loaf pan, and that’s when it went in the oven.
Warmed the milk. Hard to tell how much of an effect this had compared to the other two, but I warmed up the milk in the microwave before adding the yeast. The yeast did seem a bit bubblier.

Sandwich bread: take one

Ellen — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 01:25:15 +0000

I have long wanted to master basic bread-baking, and since a coworker got a copy of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, which has a lot of bread recipes, I decided now was a good time to try.

I’m really happy now with my recipes for risotto and penne alla vodka, but it took a number of tries to get them right; I’m sure the same will be true for bread. I’m starting with his basic Sandwich Bread recipe:

Ingredients

3 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast (or 2 teaspoons active dry yeast)
1 tablespoon sugar or honey
2 tablespoons softened butter
1 1/3 cups milk

Directions

Rehydrate/activate the yeast. Add the other wet ingredients and about half the flour and mix, then add the rest of the flour a bit at a time until it forms a slightly sticky ball.
Let rise in a bowl for at least 2 hours. Punch down into a ball and let rest 15 minutes, then form into a loaf and put in a greased loaf pan. Let rise for at least another hour.
Bake for 45 minutes at 350 degrees F.

My first attempt: not bad. I have a tasty loaf of buttery white bread. The main problem is that it’s short, squat, and extremely dense, not soft and fluffy at all. I’ve researched some things to do next time and regretted some things I did this time, so here’s what I’m going to try with the next loaf:

The milk I rehydrated the yeast in probably wasn’t warm enough, in retrospect. Some sites also recommend using water for this task even if the recipe doesn’t call for any, and cutting down on the amount of milk.
I actually let the dough rise for almost 3 hours the first time ’round, but my kitchen is pretty chilly at the moment. I’ll let it rise for a ridiculously long time next time!
Several sites recommended cutting down on the amount of flour and just using a stickier ball of dough, which makes sense.
I may eventually try bread flour instead of all-purpose, but I have enough of the latter lying around that it won’t be with the next loaf, at any rate.

In a couple of weeks I will be trying again. ‘Til next loaf!