Pretty Music and Updates

Joey loves Sharon Van Etten's music. It is very pretty. I like this song in particular. I know Beth is a fan too. This is for you guys.

I know I didn't post much this week. It was not a big food week for me; actually it was more of a slow, take-out instead of cooking kind of week. Hey, it happens.

Electronically I gained a new (home) computer and lost my work comp (Tolva 'prophet of numbers' R.I.P). It's the circle of life you know?

Anyway, I will be back with more fun tidbits next week, so keep checking back here. In the meantime, enjoy your weekend and this song 'For You,' indeed.

Why Don't You...

1. Do like Beth and eat kale like salad. Just massage raw kale leaves with salt and olive oil. They keep well in the fridge prepared like this.

2. Add bacon to your chili like Joey does. Yum!

3. Saute mushrooms with chipotle chilies and eat them taco style like me.

4. Pan roast pork chops with green peppers and tomatoes like my mom.

5. Share some other ideas with the rest of us!

Usurp!

This weekend I went shopping in my own kitchen. You know how sometimes you'll get stuff to make a recipe and then you have produce or spices that just go unused? I try to be efficient by keeping scraps for stocks and by planning my next meal based off what I need to use up. It's a fun way to keep things challenging.

What did I end up making with what I found? One night Joey and I had a cauliflower souffle and pasta with chopped grilled chicken dressed in a parsley pesto. For Sunday brunch we had pancakes.

Anyway, I wanted to share some great substitutions that I made this weekend. The last one I didn't do this weekend, but I have done it before and it really works well, especially for pancakes.

1. Sour Cream! Replace buttermilk with it. Both have a tang, so it works really well. Omit the butter from the batter. You won't need it because sour cream is high in fat.

2. Sour Cream again! Omit cheese in your souffle recipe and add sour cream. Please note you will still need some cheese to dress the souffle dish.

3. Cauliflower! Use this to replace a bechamel sauce in your souffle. This is truly great because it will really make your souffle much healthier. Add about a heaping cup of cauliflower to a pot. Add about a cup of 1% milk and a bay leaf. Keep your cheese rinds people! I added them to the pot and it added so much flavor, without the fat. I also added a teaspoon of butter. When fully tender, remove from heat. Add a pinch of ground cloves and leave covered on stove. Then pick out bay leaf and cheese rinds. Put in blender and pulse until smooth. When this is cool, stir in three egg yolks and the sour cream. BAM! You've got something going on.

4. Parsley! Make a pesto per usual, but substitute parsley for the basil.

5. Flax seeds! When you don't have eggs, just take a tablespoon of flax seeds add about a 1/4 cup of water and heat over medium flame. Stir constantly until it has the consistency of egg whites. Let cool and add to pancake batter or cake batter.

What are your go to usurpers?

Getting Fresh with Creme Fraiche

Sourced from: wasabimon.com

Joey and I used creme fraiche to make tacos last week. Since then I've been looking for creative ways to use it.

Here are some great ideas:

1. leave the milk out of your eggs and make a scrammble with it. This makes decadent eggs.

2. Mince a clove of garlic, two sun dried tomatoes and mix with creme fraiche. This makes a great topping to add to many dishes, like soup or a spicy meat dish.

3. Swirl a spoonful into your oatmeal.

4. Spread over a warm tortilla and sprinkle with salt.

5. Stir into any vegetable puree instead of cream.

Any other ideas?

Tomatillo Salsa, Encore

Yes, eating this is messy, but also tasty.

There was a lot of tomatillo salsa left over from last week, so Joey and I made skirt steak with some nice fixings. You can go here for the recipe. It is from Michael Symon's How to Cook Like an Iron Chef.

Look at what a great job Joey did grilling!

Obsession!

I am obsessed with making my own pasta. Doesn't he make it look easy? Joey! Will you let me borrow your food processor this weekend?!?

Last Month's Pork Ragu al Maialino!

Affirmative. I was roasting porky at this hour.

Doesn't the rosemary look like seaweed?

You like the look of that pork? I know I do.

This is Joey's plate. I think he liked it!

I got the fabulous idea to make a pork ragu from the New York Times. I did not follow the recipe to the letter, as cooking times varied for me. I had to roast the pork about an extra hour to get the meat to really fall off the bone. I used a small grained Himalayan salt; I believe when you salt the pork, it would be better to use a large grained salt, such as kosher or sea salt. My pork was a bit on the salty side, which in part was due to the salt I used to brine it, but also because I was too zealous when I seasoned the stock. I tend to favor salty foods, so it was still tasty to me, but I will dial back on the salt in the future. Next time I would like to make the pasta too. That would be bad ass!

Parmesean Cheese Souffle

I caught an episode of Five Ingredient Fix on the Food Network this weekend and was inspired to make a souffle with a ceasar salad, making the dressing from scratch. It was pretty easy. The picture above is not my souffle, but looks very similar to the one that I made. Joey was a big fan. You should try making it. It was pretty simple and tasted great!

Also, I wanted to let you guys know that the Grub Street fair was pretty awesome, if crowded. We had a lot of tasty treats. We enjoyed food from quite a few vendors, including, Pies and Thighs and Luke's Lobster.

As I promised last post, I am adding a quick note about a cake I made last week. I had wanted to enter the cake in a competition, but the frosting came out a bit grainy. It was my fault for having bought the wrong chocolate and then trying to fix it with granulated sugar. I gambled that the sugar would melt with the chocolate but the chocolate melted much faster. I may actually go with a totally different frosting next time, as it was perhaps too rich for a three layered cake. I guess that's why they call it devil's food cake. When I make this cake again I will try a lighter chocolate frosting.

On a final note I present you readers with a perplexity I encountered while baking this cake. As with all butter cakes, one must beat the sugar and room-temperature butter together to make a fluffy base, to which yolks are later added and other wet ingredients. Then dry ingredients must be gently mixed in. The less you mix, the more moist, hence better, your cake will be. Yet, if you are very gentle, with a thick wet-base as devil's food cake, how do you prevent flour bubbles? I had to bake this cake twice. The first time the cake was very moist, but it had little pockets of unmixed flour. The second cake had virtually no pockets of flour, but was also drier than the first. How do I keep the moistness and get a perfect texture?

It took Maybelle three days to eat this, it was so rich.

This Little Piggy Got Roasted

On July 10th of this year the New York Times published an article that has left me dreaming of roasting a whole pig. This past weekend at Atlantic Antic Joey and I shared some pulled pork from Jolie and it was so awesome to see the little roasted piggies all lined up. Over at Gothamist they posted a video of the Fatty 'Cue guys smoking their pigs and it is a thing of beauty. You guys know that Fatty 'Cue made the list, so I hope this entices you to check it out.

How the Pig Gets Smoked at Fatty 'Cue from Gregory Stefano on Vimeo.

Michelin Copies Arlette

Okay, not really. We do, however, both have lists of places to eat and those lists meet up at certain places, meaning that we can rest assured that Michelin is to be trusted. Right, that's how the logic goes on that one? You can head to Grub Street to see what is on their list. Here is the list Joey and I have compiled. What do you guys think? Am I missing anything here, should something be omitted? Opine damnit! My taste buds need to know.

Luke's Lobster
Fette Sau
Fatty 'Cue
Comadore
Salty
Riverside Cafe
Mercadito
Al di La
Blue Ribbon
Scarpetta
French Bistro on Franklin(Le Gamin)
Pauly Gs
Five Leaves
Frankies Spuntino
Freemans
Manhattan Inn
Traif
Lamb and Jaffy
mesa coyocana
Acapulco (for a bite or take out when near your apartment)
Jimmys Diner (fried chicken!!!)
OTT
Christies (Polish food)
Cafe Colette
Osteria il Paiolo
Empanada Mama

Fried Oreos Highlight of Atlantic Antic 2010

This past weekend at Atlantic Antic,Joey, I and friends experienced the pleasure of drinking outside and eating food that is very bad, and thus, oh so good! Like the trooper he is, Joey started off the day with fried Oreos, which won a little patch of realestate in my heart. I am posting a low-tech but sweet video on how to make them. Check it out!

Joseph Albert's Night Time Astronaut Dropped Yesterday

Hey all! Joey's first full length album is complete. Below is a performance of one of the songs on it, Ask Amy. I believe you can now or soon will be able to purchase it on itunes. He will have CDs available at a forthcoming CD release party. I wil post with more info as I hear about it. Congrats Joey!

Basil Chicken Tacos with Relish and Cream

Do you know how when you buy basil it smells so good and is such a lovely and bright addition to your meal, but a little goes a long way? Inevitably, you put the rest of it in the fridge and two nights later half of the basil is brown and dying? Yeah. I hate it when that happens. Thus, the other day Joey and I blended up the basil with garlic in his food processor. We ended up using it to make Southwest Potatoes with a poached a egg on top.

It was a great meal. We followed Bittman's lead, but made it better by using the basil puree as the oil base and then, also using some fat rendered from a wonderful smokey bacon from the Meat Hook (thanks Sean) to brown the potatoes. At the end, we used the crumbled bacon on top of the dish before finishing with cilantro and lastly the egg. I don't have pictures from that meal, but trust me, It was awesome.

At home I made my own basil puree in a blender. It is a lot harder to do it in a blender, so if you are going to, put very few leaves at a time and be prepared to use more oil. As a slight aside, Bittman just wrote an article on the wonder and awesomeness of food processors.

The second puree was just basil and oil. Today I finally got to use it and what I made was so good, I am sharing it with you.

Making the chicken

thin cut chicken cutlets (1 per person)

basil puree (olive oil and basil pureed together)

Adobo, salt and pepper to taste

I followed a loose interpretation of another Bittman idea to cook them up, basically using the puree as a moisture seal for the lean meat.

Making the relish

For the relish, and really the whole idea of having tacos this week, I was inspired by a show on the food network. It's one about using just five ingredients to make things. I don't know what the name of the show is. Anyway, the show was more of an inspiration than a directive and I just used what I had.

Equal parts diced yellow onion, green pepper and radishes

Lemon zest and dry cumin

I felt pretty ingenious when I put this together. I knew that I wanted to add a lemon flavor to the relish but I did not want to add a lemon, oil combo to it because the cutlets are packed with an olive oil infused stuffing. Instead I took my peeler and shaved off some zest and diced it up and threw it in the bowl with the vegetables and then sprinkled the whole thing with cumin. I chose cumin because if I had fresh cilantro, I would have put it in.

Making the Cream

This was the easiest part and I also got my inspiration for making this from that cooking show. I took polish cream, which is basically just like sour cream except that the reduced fat version still only had cream in it rather than stuff like corn syrup (yuck Breakstone's). Anyway, I took a spoonful of that and mixed it with a spoonful of Salpica Habanero Lime salsa. Both are really good on their own, so their marriage was the perfect edible proof that opposites attract. The creamy cooling flavors mixing harmoniously with the acidic, smokey ones, perfectly topped my happy little tacos.

Success!

I am posting more pictures on Facebook, if you want to check them out. I hope this inspires some of you to try this at home.

Heaven on Plate, If a Little Late

Back in March I went on a kick where I was obsessed with the tiny slow cooker that Maybelle gave me. Over a three day period I created a simulacra of a meal I had with Joey, or rather that he had on one of our first dates. We went to Mesa Coyocana and I had tacos, he had enchiladas and we shared cactus, which I loved. It was a really amazing night except for when the runner left us guacamole and we decided it was complementary, which has happened to me at the wonderful Mercadito Cantina--only to be later blamed as the cause of our neighbor's delayed appetizer by a catty waiter.

Anyway, Joey gave me a bite of his dinner and it left me hankering for a full plate of my own, so I set out on my adventure. Below is a picture diary of the process.

I started by making a pot of beans with aromatics. Of course, the beans were cleaned and I added salt to taste, but pretty much what you see is what you get. All you need is about a medium low heat and patience. You want your beans to be velvety not gritty, so take your time and taste often.

The next day I cooked a nice fatty pork shoulder in my little slow cooker. It fit quite nicely in the pot. The idea is quite simple here too. I took a generous amount of adobo and applies as a dry rub. Then I cut up green peppers, onions and dropped garlic cloves in. I also added water and covered it. This cooked all day and night until the pork fell off the bone. Before heading to work the next day, I put it in a new container and stored it in the fridge.



The following day I took out my spices to create the sauce for the enchilada. I had done this sauce before and had taken it from one of m cook books. I decided that it was too thin in it's original form so I added tomato sauce to get the right consistency.



The trick to the sauce is too heat all of the dry ingredients until they are aromatic. This whole endeavour is an exercises in patience. Heat oil, garlic and then spices. Then add can of tomato sauce and vinegar. Leave a comment if you want exact proportions.



I then went to gather all my materials to put together the enchiladas, including the pork that gained a nice golden hue over the many hours of slow cooking.



Putting together the enchilada was a cinch. I heated the oven and then dipped tortillas in the sauce and then added beans, pork and finished them with a smoked cheddar.



I kept it simple and just did an overlap wrap. I poured some more sauce over the enchiladas before putting them in the oven.



I had a nice system in place while I was making them. I would pop a few in the oven and then wrap them in aluminum foil. I planned to keep a few and to give some to Joey, since he played a part in my inspiration.



Here is a close up of the enchiladas when they were done. I really enjoyed them. I will probably make them again when the weather gets cold again. Let me know and I will set some aside for you. For all the work it takes, it doesn't make sense to make a small batch!