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Archive for the ‘Grains’ Category

Moose Spanish Meatballs and Vegetable Paella

Posted in Book Recipes, Food, Game, Grains, Green Vegetables, tagged , , , , , , , on March 23, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

 

A good friend of mine (same one who was generous with the pheasants), was nice enough to also give me a 2 lb. piece of moose meat. I was not even sure what cut of the huge animal it was, but seemed like a round roast. It felt tough and possibly not suitable for a quick cooking method. Not exactly sure what to do with it, I emailed Hank from honest-food and asked him what he would do. He immediately pointed me to the Swedish moose meatballs recipe he had. Meatballs. That sounded good, but another meatball recipe came to mind. It’s a delicious Spanish recipe from Penelope Casas’ book “Tapas”. Last time I made this recipe was for the World Cup final between Spain and Netherlands and it was a big hit.

Since we had friends coming over for dinner, I decided to make a meal out of the meatballs and accompany them with another Spanish dish (more on that in a minute). The meatballs are fairly standard. Mix the meat with garlic, bread crumbs, eggs, parsley and form them into balls. These then get browned in olive oil and the sauce gets made in the same pan. That’s what takes this dish to the next level, that sauce. It’s made from a base of onions, carrots, green onions and a handful of whole garlic cloves. To that I add a mixture beef broth, white wine and almonds all blended to a semi-smooth liquid. The meatballs and some frozen peas simmer in that lovely sauce for a good while until the sauce gets thick and creamy.

Another Penelope Casas recipe that I love, this one from “La Cocina de Mama“, is the vegetable paella. Is it still a paella if it does not have saffrom? Casas does use saffron in this dish, but I think it works better without it. I love the saffron in meat or seafood paellas, but in this one it just takes over the mild vegetable flavors. So, I usually omit it and up the smoked paprika amount plus adding a small pinch of turmeric  for color. It’s a delicious dish on it’s own or as a fodder for those fantastic meatballs.

For dessert, we had a version of Thomas Keller’s shortcakes from “The French Laundry Cookbook” with my version of a mixed berry ice cream, vanilla creme fraiche sauce and chopped strawberries.

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Barley Miso Porridge, Soft Cheese, Vegetables

Posted in Book Recipes, Dairy, Food, Grains, Green Vegetables, Recipes, Root Vegetables, Sous Vide, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 23, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Aesthetically, this dish needs work, but I am extremely proud of how delicious it was. The flavors popped and worked brilliantly together. It was fresh, healthy and refined. Cooking from the NOMA cookbook is not an easy feat. NOMA in Copenhagen is the new “Best Restaurant in the World”. Rene Redzepi’s cuisine is fiercely local, and in Scandinavia local means sea buckthorn, spruce, dulse seaweed, bulrushes and whole bunch of other wild edibles. This recipe is by no means from that book, but it was inspired by a recipe from it. I already had the purple and yellow carrots on hand and was wondering how to best serve them in a vegetarian dish and while flipping through the Noma book, which focuses a lot on vegetables, I came across the recipe he calls “Vegetables from Lammefjorden, Sea Buckthorn and Gooseberries“. No sea buckthorn or gooseberries for me at this time. So, I stole the idea for the custardy fresh cheese combined with perfectly cooked vegetables (that are definitely not from Lammefjorden) and a brown butter-chicken glace sauce.

Here are the vegetables I used (Lots of washing, peeling and chopping…good vegetarian food is a lot of work):

Purple Carrots, peeled but left whole and bagged with butter, salt and a teaspoon or so of sugar. Cooked sous vide at 85C for about 1.5 hours.

Yellow Carrots, peeled but left whole and bagged with butter, salt and a couple of teaspoons of honey. Cooked sous vide at 85C for about 1.5 hours.

Leeks, cut into 2 inch rounds and oven-braised with butter, water and Oloroso sherry. Before serving they were seared over high heat.

Cabbage, cut into thin wedges and blanched in salty water then refreshed in an ice bath. Heated in beurre monte (butter/water emulsion) before serving.

Swiss chard, inner smaller leaves blanched in salty water then refreshed in an ice bath. Heated in beurre monte (butter/water emulsion) before serving.

The base for the dish is a porridge of sorts, but not a mushy gruel, rather its grains are distinct and the flavors are fresh and savory. This is based on Heston Blumenthal’s famous dish from the Fat Duck. He uses regular rolled oats and tosses them in a mixture of parsley butter. Auldo from “The Big Fat Undertaking” blog cooked and wrote about it here. I used barley because I love its texture and flavor. I also made my own parsley butter sauce that uses a good dose of umami-rich Miso to complement all the vegetables in the dish. The end result is fantastic and I will definitely be making this as a side dish or a starch for future meals. The recipe for it is posted at the end of this entry.

The fresh cheese is from the Noma recipe. It’s made from milk, cream, buttermilk and rennet. It’s allowed to set at a very low temperature until it resembles very soft tofu. To serve, it is just spooned on top of the porridge. The other component from the Noma recipe is the brown butter sauce. That’s made from reduced chicken stock, brown butter, balsamic vinegar, shallots and parsley.

 

Barley Porridge with Parsley-Miso Butter

Barley:

  • 1/2 Cup pearl barley
  • A 3 inch piece of leek, mostly from the greener part
  • Sprinkle of salt

Parlsey-Miso Butter:

  • About a half bunch chopped parlsey
  • 1/2 of a small shallot, chopped
  • 1 heaping tablespoon Shiro Miso (white or more like blond Miso)
  • Juice of half a lime
  • About 1/4 cup hot water
  • 4 Tablespoons melted butter

Put the barley in a pot with plenty of water and bring to a rolling boil. Drain the barley and put them back in the pot with the leek and salt and cover with about 2 inches of water. Bring to a boil and cover. cook on a gentle heat until tender, about 20-25 minutes. When done there should be very little or no water left. The barley should be tender but with a toothsome texture. If not, add a little more water and cook a bit longer.

Make the Parsley-Miso butter by pureeing everything together until as smooth as possible. Pass through a sieve if you want to but I did not.

Finish the porridge by mixing in the Parsley-Miso butter while the barley is very warm and serve it immediately. The barley can be made a day or two ahead of time. In that case heat it in the pot with a couple fo tablespoons of water before mixing in the parsley-Miso butter.

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Porcini Pheasant, Creamed Corn, Carrot-Orange Sauce

Posted in Book Recipes, Food, Game, Grains, Green Vegetables, Sous Vide, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

I have cooked pheasant a couple of times before and was always underwhelmed. I hear wild pheasant is a different animal and is delicious, but this farm-raised, store-bought bird is always ho-hum. The legs are tough and stringy with numerous little tendons/bones and the breast meat seems to dry out very fast even though it does have a deeper flavor than a run-of-the-mill chicken. This time I treated the breasts and legs very differently. For the legs I removed the thigh bone and painstakingly removed every string, tendon and skinny bone from the drumstick (but left the main femur there) while keeping the whole quarter in one piece. A pain in the ass that was. Then I seasoned the leg quarters with salt, cayenne, pepper, thyme and bay. I placed them in a bowl of buttermilk and let them cure overnight. the next day we had them fried after a quick dredge in flour. These were pretty good with an eggplant puree. Unfortunately, my camera settings were all screwed up and I have no decent pictures. On to the breasts.

I seasoned those with salt, pepper and thyme and let them sit overnight as well. Thanks to the very nice folks at Ajinomoto (really friendly, helpful and excellent customer service) I have a good bit of Activa RM (Transglutaminase), aka meat glue. This is an enzyme that binds specific types of proteins together, effectively gluing them. Ever wonder how a certain type of turkey at the deli counter looks like it is in one large uniformly shaped piece? Transglutaminase. I dusted the surface of the meat with a bit of Activa, no more than 8 grams or so, and then rolled it into a tight log using plastic wrap. The pheasant log went back to the fridge for the Activa to set, about 6 hours. To cook it, I sealed it in a FoodSaver bag and cooked it en sous vide for about 2 hours at  146 F.

The pheasant was cooked just in time to be plated. To finish it I borrowed an idea from Marc Vetri in his book “Il Viaggio di Vetri” and coated the cooked pheasant with a mixture of olive oil and dried porcini powder. He uses this method to cook halibut and serves it with a blueberry sauce. Then I gently pan cooked the meat for a few minutes over medium heat. The smell was amazing and the porcini really gave the seasoned pheasant a wonderful flavor kick. The enzyme bound the two breast halves perfectly and the slices were neat and efficient. More importantly the meat was cooked perfectly and was not dry. I did not want to throw away the pheasant  skin, so I had it seasoned just like the breasts and for the same amount of time. Then I baked the skin at 400 F sandwiched between parchment lined baking sheets until it got golden and crispy.

The pheasant was good, but the component that I cannot wait to make again here is the creamed corn. The recipe for that is straight from “The French Laundry” cookbook and it is utterly delicious. Too often is creamed corn made the butt end of jokes. It can be soupy, mushy, loaded with salt and cream. Here is how to elevate this humble dish to pure sweet corn heaven. All that is needed is fresh corn, a little butter and salt. No cream included at all, yet the end result is smooth, creamy and full of corn flavor. The secret is using corn juice. More than half of the fresh corn kernels was pureed in a blender and then strained to yield corn juice. The remaining kernels were blanched in boiling water and cooled. To finish the dish, the corn juice gets heated and because of its starch content it thickens to the consistency of whipping cream. The last step is to add the corn kernels, butter and seasoning. That’s it for the best and most addictive creamed corn.

The sauce is based on a recipe from Michel Richard’s book “Happy in the Kitchen” where he uses it in a squab dish. It consists of fresh carrot juice, orange juice, ginger and cut up peach. I used a very flavorful nectarine that I had on hand instead of the peach. I also decided the sauce was a bit too sharp for the rest of the dish and rounded it out with a couple of tablespoons of butter that I whisked in right before plating.

I wanted to garnish the finished dish with clusters of Enoki mushrooms but as luck would have it I could not find any Enoki that day and went with asparagus. I blanched the spears in salted water and quickly cooled them in ice water. I only wanted the top two inches here, so I trimmed that off the stalks (used the stalks for an excellent risotto the next day). Right before service, I finished cooking the asparagus tips in a warm butter emulsion (beurre monte). The other garnish was the crispy and delicious pheasant crackling.

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Chiringuito Paella a la Marinera

Posted in Fish, Food, Grains, Shrimp, tagged , , , , , , , on May 19, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

A perfect paella is a wonderful dish. I love the process of cooking it to perfection almost as much as I enjoy eating the result. Like many “traditional” dished tied to locales, it inspires arguments and controversy as to what constitutes the proper “Paella”. Supposedly the original dish was cooked over an open fire by the men, while women attended Sunday service at church. It’s also a dish created by shepherds and farmers with no access to the ocean. So, the true Paella Valenciana included nothing more than what the cooks could hunt, gather and grow. The ingredient list was limited to rice, snails, rabbit and some beans. Unlike most current incarnations, including this one here, the original dish certainly used no saffron. As the popularity of the dish spread, cooks incorporated more and more local ingredients like chicken, chorizo and seafood.

As far as I am concerned a Paella has to be cooked in the pan that gives the dish its name, a Paella. The shallow flat carbon steel pan reacts quickly to heat fluctuation and aids in the quick evaporation of liquid. The pan also helps maximize the surface area that comes in contact with the rice. The contact, while the rice is left unstirred as it cooks, produces another Paella must-have, a crispy tasty crust that sticks to the pan and is known as Socarrat. The layers of rice in a proper Paella has to be thin, ideally no more than an inch thick. One can make a very good rice dish in a regular pot, but that’s more like a pilaf than a Paella. The type of rice to use is a good short grain one like Spanish Bomba or even Italian risotto rice like Violone Nano.

This particular recipe here is adapted from Anya Von Bremzen’s book “The New Spanish Table“. Chiringuitos in the title refers to humble seaside shops that are the Spanish coast’s equivalent to New England’s clam shacks. The dish includes clams, shrimp, squid and red snapper. I also added quartered artichoke hearts to the mix. It is flavored with onions, tomatoes, garlic and saffron. Von Bremzen recommends the cook not to skip the Allioli that is traditionally served with Paella, and I took her advice. Allioli is a type of mayonnaise made with a good bit of raw garlic and olive oil. A spoonful on top of a serving of the rice adds tons of flavor, some kick and a wonderful creamy mouthfeel.

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King Trumpet, Miso, Fried Tofu

Posted in Food, Grains, Legumes, Mushrooms, Root Vegetables, Sous Vide, Tofu, tagged , , , , , , on April 8, 2010 | 4 Comments »

I was picking up some ingredients for another dinner of Ramen the other day and stumbled on these awesome looking King Trumpet mushrooms. They looked fresh and plump, so I picked a few clusters up. The first thing that came to mind is to treat them as if they were the more prestigious Porcini or Matsutake mushrooms. When cooked like this these trumpets so resemble the texture of scallops and have an earthy mild flavor. I sliced each mushroom in half and slashed it in a corss-hatch pattern. These were then marinated in Ponzu sauce while I prepared the rest of the dish. Right before serving, I pan fried them in garlic flavored oil and re-seasoned with Ponzu.

The miso sauce was pretty simple. It consisted of soy milk, dashi (prepared following Cooking Issues method: 10g/L Kombu/water, circulated for 1 hr at 65C) white miso, pickled ginger and was set with a little Gellan F to give a good texture. It was very tasty and I could see a soup made from those ingredients and maybe garnished with mushrooms. I had seen in the Alinea cookbook a technique that makes a “sheet sauce”. Basically a sauce is gelled with gelatin or gellan and frozen. It is then cut into rectangles (or any other shape as appropriate) and then it is placed on top of the food at service. The sauce then comes to room temperature and coats the food item in an even layer. The effect is both functional (an even layer of sauce) and aesthetically beautiful. Here is a post of this technique by one of the chefs at Alinea on the Alinea-Mosaic site. You can also see a couple of examples on Alineaphile’s blog here and here. I wanted to give this technique a shot with this dish, but did not want to risk it completely not working. So I divided the sauce up into two. One got the freezing on acetate treatment and the other sat in a bowl in the fridge. I’m glad I did that. The sheet sauce kind of worked but it is not nearly as successful as I had hoped. I think it needed to be thicker to work better.

For the tofu, I made my own bean curd and cut it into cubes. I seasoned them with chinese 10-spice powder and breaded them (egg wash, flour, crumbs) with Panko bread crumbs before frying them till nice and crispy. I wanted to add some color to the dish and that’s where the orange sweet potato balls came in. I cooked them Sous Vide with a few tablespoons of pickled ginger juice. They tasted fantastic and looked really nice on the plate.

The rice is regular sushi rice seasoned with rice wine vinegar and sugar. Cooking it in more dashi as opposed to water gave it a deep and rich flavor. To make it into a cylinder I  extruded it through an oiled cannoli mold. The garnishes were soy bean sprouts (much more falvorful, substantial and have a better texture than mung bean sprouts I think) that were seasoned with rice wine vinegar and a touch of salt. The purple leaves are some sort of basil I think. They have a good sharp mint/basil flavor. I picked them up at the Asian grocery store as well and they had no label, but worked well in the dish and added a good color.

Here are a couple of shots of the dish plated with the “sheet sauce”. Notice how it kind of breaks a bit as opposed to staying intact and enveloping everything. I think a touch more gelling agent and making the sheet a bit thicker will help a lot. Overall this dish was fantastic, a really refined, delicious and wonderful looking vegetarian main course.

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Thai Duck, Barley, Pumpkin puree and Banana pudding

Posted in Duck, Food, Grains, Green Vegetables, Sous Vide on November 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

The combination of pumpkin (or butternut squash in this case) and banana seems has been something I’ve wanted to try out for a while. Specifically since I saw it in an Alinea dish combined with duck. In the Alinea cookbook the recipe is for a pumpkin soup and bite of grilled duck breast with a dollop of banana pudding all flavored with Thai-inspired components. Carol cooked this dish on her blog, and Martin made it as well on his fantastic Alinea blog. The combination popped up again on Ideas in Food, this time in what appears to me as a dessert and combines raw and cooked pumpkin with crumbled and pureed banana. For my take on it I used Alinea’s recipe as a guide/template but made it into more of an entree as opposed to a small soup course.

I brined boneless skin-on duck breasts in a liquid with Thai flavors comprised of fresh pineapple juice, salt, brown sugar, chillies, kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, ginger and cinnamon. All the brine ingredients were brought up to boil along with water and allowed to steep for a few hours. After straining and chilling, the duck went in there for about 3 hours. In hindsight, I think more time in the brine would’ve even made for a better duck.

The banana “pudding” was done in the now-familiar Alinea style for these sauces. Roasted banana and banana chips were simmered with half and half and agar agar then allowed to set. I then pureed it in a blender and added kaffir lime juice. I almost never see fresh kaffir limes, so when I saw some at Central Market while shopping for this dish, I immediately picked some up and knew I will use the zest and juice. I roasted the butternut squash and to make a puree I simmered the roasted flesh with a little cream and duck stock then passed it through a sieve to make a smooth puree. After tasting it, I decided it needed a little more sweetness to round the flavor and make it a better match to the kaffir flavored banana pudding and the tart pomegranate sauce. I did not want to add sugar though so I used grape molasses. In Lebanon this product, called Dibs Inab, is eaten as a snack mixed with tahini and bread is dipped in it. It is delicious like that but I love to use it as a component in dishes just like any other syrup. It is sweet but n0t cloying and has a great flavor that is a bit smoky and reminds me of chocolate to some point. So a couple of tablespoons of that rounded the squash puree’s flavor nicely.

I wanted to add an interesting tart element and first thought of a cranberry coulis. However, pomegranate juice seemed even more appropriate. I just blended it with Ultratex-3 until it thickened properly. The barley was done following a procedure from another Alinea recipe. I first cooked it with in water, then dried it in a dehydrator (aka my countertop electric convection oven). An hour or so before serving, I fried the dried cooked barley in very hot oil until puffed a bit and became nice and crunchy. This stuff is delicious and a very addictive snack. It works well in savory dishes or on ice cream. It definitely added a much needed textural variation to this dish and a nutty taste.

I removed the duck from the brine, and sealed it in a FoodSaver bag. It was then cooked Sous Vide at 132 F for about an hour. Before serving, I seared the skin side only on low heat to crisp and brown the skin. On the plate went a long “squiggle” of the banana pudding flanked by the squash puree. Duck cubes went on top of the banana and were garnished with a small dollop of the banana pudding. That drop was used to anchor the garnish of red chilli, cilantro leaves and candied kaffir lime zest. I topped the squash puree with dots (waited too long to take the picture and the dots “ran” a bit) of the pomegranate sauce.

The dish was delicious and I would be happy to make it again. The flavors worked great together and the crunchy nutty barley was a perfect foil for the squash and juicy medium rare duck.  The colors of the dish look great as well, but I am not too happy with the overall plating. It’s a bit sloppy because the plate is a bit too narrow. Next time I will more than likely serve this in a square or round plate.

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VDP: Black Bean and Pumpkin Burgers

Posted in Breads and Pies, Grains, Green Vegetables, Legumes, Vegetarian Dinners Project (VDP), tagged , , , , on October 27, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Sunday, October 20, 2008

My feelings about veggie burgers is similar to those about vegetarian chilli. I regard them as completely different dishes than their meat-centric counterparts. Veggie burgers are by no means a substitute for the real thing, but if you perceive them as nothing more than flavorful bean and vegetable patties, they work very well. Of course, they also cannot be those frozen processed hockey pucks they sell at the frozen food section.

Making vegetarian burgers at home is very simple, much easier than I expected. Armed with a basic recipe from Bittman’s Vegetarian book and several of his variations I made these patties in no time at all. The basic recipe for veggie burgers includes mostly cooked beans of any kind, some old fashioned oatmeal and an egg. Within moderation, all kinds of stuff can be added. Here I added onions, garlic, smoked paprika and roasted pumpkin. The patties are cooked in an oiled cast iron skillet until crispy on the outside and fluffy soft on the inside.

I served them on home-baked buns with Dijon mustard, lettuce and a persimmon relish. A few words about the persimmon relish here. We actually went persimmon picking this past weekend at a local farm outside of Houston. It was a fun day with the kids and we ended up with a few pounds of wonderful sweet and tasty fruit. To make the relish I chopped the persimmon and mixed it with olive oil, lemon juice, basil and mint. Interestingly enough the sandwich as a whole with the crunchy soft patty and the herbs in the relish reminded me a lot of Lebanese falafel. That’s it! Falafel is probably the best and oldest version of a veggie burger.

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VDP: Quinoa with Roasted Winter Squash

Posted in Grains, Green Vegetables, Vegetarian Dinners Project (VDP), tagged , , on October 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

I am not sure why it took me so long to try cooking Quinoa. I’ve had this bag of it sitting in my pantry for a couple of months now. I guess I was worried it would be tough to cook, or maybe Diana would not like it or I would not like it… Sure, I’ve had it once before, at El Bulli in Spain of all places, but it was such a small sample and I did not remember exactly how it tasted. Today was the day though.

I roasted some winter squash and glazed them with soy, ginger and maple syrup following a Cook’s Illustrated recipe and made quinoa to go with them. I used a basic recipe in Bittman’s vegetarian book. It could not have been simpler and cooks pretty fast. I sautéed the tiny grains in some olive oil with onions and added twice the amount of quinoa in water. Let it simmer, cover and cook. Very much like making rice.

The result was excellent and appreciated by everyone. The quinoa was fluffy and tender with a bit of texture. The taste was mild and very slightly vegetal. I will by using it instead of rice in many dishes in the future.

The squashes? Of course these were great. I love them in all their varieties, here I used an acorn squash and a couple of baby pumpkins.

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