Lessons from the Minimalist

Pulling out a Mark Bittman article from the January 19, 2005 New York Times, there were three healthy eating recipes in the piece, one of which was crossed out.  I guess that I had tried the Lentils with Bulgur and Herb Salad and didn’t like it.  No need to try it again, leaving me to wonder if I would like the Whole-Grain Crostini with Beans and Greens and the Vietnamese Stir-Fried Vegetables with Chicken or Shrimp.  There’s only one way to find out.

  

The Beans and Greens has all the things that I like, how could I go wrong?  White beans sauteed with greens, onion, garlic, and sage would appear to be a no brainer.  As much as I wanted to follow the recipe faithfully, I substituted kale for spinach since I already had it.  I boiled the kale to get it to the point where it could have a quick sautee with the alliums and beans, like the spinach would have been.   I resisted the temptation to add crushed red pepper or lemon, thinking that it would overwhelm the sage.  The result was pasty and bland, did the spinach make that much of a difference?  My guess is not, so at this point, I needed to make it into what I like, not what it was a meant to be.  In goes a 15-oz. can of tomatoes for tanginess, 1/4t crushed red pepper for spice, and 1/4 cup parmesan cheese for richness.  It’s a completely different dish, but now we’re talking, and liking.

With two strikes, I dreaded the third recipe in the bunch, wondering if it too would be a dud.  The stir-fry was sparse – garlic, no ginger, fish sauce, and black pepper.  I followed it religiously, including stir-frying the broccoli, carrots, and snow peas separately, which enveloped my apartment in a fog of smoke.  Staring at the humble yet colorful heap, I wondered how good it could possibly be.  Very good.  The black pepper shined through, even though it wasn’t drenched in sauce.  The attention paid to each vegetable grouping paid off, being crisp yet tender.  A home run.

   

 

Butter Fish

  

I think that when I originally saved this recipe in 2001, I had only read the ingredients and not the directions.  Jeremiah Tower’s Fish Paillard with Ginger, Garlic and Tomatoes from the April 18, 2001 (!) New York Times, has all the components that I like, and way too much of what I love – butter.  Reading the recipe now, what is intriguing is that the fish is barely cooked.  Thinly pounded, sushi-quality fish is placed on an oven hot plate, and then covered in a hot butter sauce.  The fish stays tender and juicy, never to dry out in its butter bath.  It’s crazy good, but hardly healthy, especially when I want to sop up every bit of sauce with a chunk of bread.  

Since sushi-quality fish is required, because it never fully cooks, I imagine that it’s a good way to use up leftover sushi.  A light pounding to make the filets thinner, and it’s practically done.  Subsequently, as a leftover itself, the dish is great a day later, zapped in the microwave for a minute.  In other words, it’s good cooked too.

Nuts!

   

After the overkill of work bake sales, I decided to go savory with the work cocktail party.  I tapped into my 50 cent stoop sale purchase, Party Nuts, for each of its three genres – sweet, salty, and spicy.  Much was based on what I already had in house – the four chiles that I had for killer peanuts; brown sugar instead of white sugared pecans; and then there were the pistachios.  I wanted to use up the pistachios that I had, and ended up buying more exotica – zaatar and almonds.  The combination of pistachios, almonds, zaatar, oregano and sesame was a hit, and the first of the nuts to go.  Such little effort, such big appreciation.

In toasting the nuts, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the oven that’s f-cocted.  The nuts were under baked and not browned at all, unlike a small extra batch that I cooked up in my toaster oven.  I’ll have to take a thermometer to it to see if it’s a matter of temperature compensation, or if it’s a real house call problem.  Nuts!

The Bake Sale

  

A charity bake sale at work gave me the opportunity to try out the oven for the first time.  Excited to bake, I realized that I didn’t have any baking pans.  No cookie sheets, cake pans, or muffin tins to speak of, limiting my baking options.  Granted, I could have just run out and buy whatever, but I like to be methodical with what goes in the kitchen.  I do have a few Pyrex pieces –  a loaf pan, a pie pan, and a casserole dish – which forced my decision:  brownies in the 12″ x 8″ casserole dish.  Wanting to make the perfect brownie, I used Cook’s Illustrated’s recipe for Classic Brownies.  Unusual in that chocolate and butter are melted in a large mixing bowl over simmering water, then taken off heat to add in four eggs, one at a time, then the dry ingredients.  I would think that the eggs would cook in the warm bowl, but it probably keeps the brownies extra fudgy.  

The big challenge was the oven.  The brownies took twice as long to cook, which was either because the oven runs at a lower temperature, the pyrex needs a higher temperature, or the size of the pan which is slightly smaller in area, created more cooking volume.  In short, wtf?  The end result was drier than I liked, but tasty nevertheless.

I also tackled the brown butter rice krispie treats again.  This time, I  decreased the rice krispies to six cups, and browned the butter at the lowest temperature possible to to fix the dry and “shattering” problem.  It worked, but in exchange for more gooey-ness, it was more greasy to the touch.  Next time, and there will be a next time, a little less butter.  Viva la bake sale!

Un-Gothic Nicoise Salad

  

I fell in love with the ink black string beans that I saw at the Commodities Natural Market.  So much so that they inspired me to make a gothic nicoise salad based on the Canal House Cooking’s Next to Nil Nicoise Salad.  Black Prince cherry tomatoes and dusky red fingerlings contributed to the dark palette, residing in a briny anchoive and caper vinaigrette, along with olive oil packed tuna and hard boiled egg.

When the time came to blanch the beans, they transformed into normal green beans in the boiling water.  Like Mr. Hyde turning back into Dr. Jekyll, they were washed from their guise.  Sigh.  A disappointment in looks, but not in taste, my salad was sunny and colorful, more Beach Boys than Bauhaus.

Choose Oyster Sauce

     

Continuing the recipes from that ripped out page from the September 2006 issue of Food and Wine, I made Spicy Ginger Pork in Lettuce Leaves and Spicy Shrimp and Cellophane-Noodle Salad.  Once the prep was done, both were very good and very easy.  The components are versatile, allowing for various spin offs, lest my boredom.  The stir-fried ground pork with water chestnuts and red pepper, which is supposed to be an elegant appetizer, nestled in lettuce leaves, can be made into a less dainty Thai salad over chopped lettuce and a sprinkling of toasted rice powder.  Or over rice itself for a main course.  The shrimp and noodles are supposed to be a salad in itself with whole leaves of mint, basil and cilantro, but I minced up the herbs to have it over lettuce.  It will also make for good summer rolls, for another interpretation.

 

I attribute the success of these two recipes, not necessarily to my prowess, but to oyster sauce.  I have made version of Vietnamese noodle salad before and this dressing has been the best, due to the richness of the oyster sauce which incorporates the lime and fish sauce so well.  The sauce also enhances the pork for more salty, meaty goodness.  Blame it on the MSG, the unabashed fourth ingredient on the bottle.  It’s as un-PC as margarine, but it does make everything better.

 

Back in Blackened

Intrigued by The Kitchn’s post on “banana” ice cream – pureed frozen banana that resembles ice cream – I had to put it to the test.  Never to waste a thing, I had a blackened frozen banana in the freezer, ripe for trying out.  A not so quick peel (no one tells you that the skin to frozen bananas are stick on, and don’t just slip off), a quick whirr in the blender, and it’s done.  So easy, it barely merits itself as a “recipe”.  It looks like ice cream, has the consistency of ice cream, and is sweet indeed.  For a little more dimension, I added some burned pecans, which I also couldn’t bring myself to throw away, hoping that they would redeem themselves one day.    I also topped my dessert with unloved grilled figs for a little charcoal.  Two, if not three, wrongs made a right.

Roasted Red Pepper Soup

I like to follow recipes verbatim because I think that I’ll learn something.  Such was not the case with Food and Wine’s Roasted Red Pepper Soup with Seared Scallops from September 2006 from the file pile.  First of all, I bailed on the scallops.  Last minute guests were coming over, and I didn’t have the time to run out for the title ingredient.  Besides, I was mostly interested in the soup, which should be substantial on its own.

I had roasted the red peppers ahead of time, which makes putting the soup together a snap.  I chose to roast the peppers over a gas flame as opposed to in the oven, as stated in the recipe.  Feeling like a human rotisserie, turning the peppers round and round so that they’d blacken evenly in all its crevices, it’s more work than I want to do.  Schlamping them in the oven for 45 minutes would’ve been so much easier.   The hardest work was removing the charred skin, a messy affair that gets charcoal and seeds everywhere.  I try to keep it contained by rinsing them in a strainer, but there seems to be no easy way around it.  Letting the peppers steam in a paper bag, post-char, only gets off a little, not a lot of the skin.  If there were instructions in this, I would have followed it.

I made the rest of the soup accordingly, a puree with minced pieces of peppers.  Complexity in flavor comes from the cumin, orange and cilantro, all of which bring out the sweetened roasted flavor of the peppers.  A dash of cream would’ve added more velvet-y smoothness, but I had tweaked enough already.

Not My Chicken Soup

   

From an ancient pre-century issue of Martha Stewart Living comes Kate’s Lemon Chicken Vegetable Soup.  A chicken soup, for me, is generally a mish mash of what’s about to expire in the fridge or pantry.  I stridently veer from the water-y, salty Campbell’s soup variety of many a disappointing childhood lunches, erring towards excess which becomes something other than chicken soup.  If I was to follow the straight and narrow, my favorite recipe is the Cook’s Illustrated version which is the Cadillac to Campbell’s clunker – a hearty broth and chock full of noodles, chicken and vegetables.  Martha’s/Kates’ version doesn’t seem like a far stretch, if only better with the addition of lemon, herbs, tomato and parsnip – all things that I like.  Unfortunately, it’s not my cup of chicken soup, it’s just too sweet.  More of a function of the parsnips and mint, it’s a bit cloying.  The parsnips were doubly vexing with its spongy texture.  Sorry Martha.  Sorry Kate.

Knowing Couscous

   

From a June 2001 Bon Appetit, I saved a recipe for Minted Mediterranean Couscous.  Years later, I already know how to make couscous and tabbouleh the way that I like it, what could this tell me that I don’t already know?  That I don’t have to cook red pepper if I chop it fine enough.  That olives and feta make everything better.  That mint alone makes a great couscous salad.  Easy enough to make quickly, it’s a keeper.  That I know.