Ribs from two beasts

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So this partially-written post has been hanging around in my drafts folder for a while now, and I haven’t been at all excited about completing it, because the recipes I am about to describe were both so perfectly unexciting that I’m just not really that inspired to write about them.  But, history is made by foot soldiers as well as generals, and if this blog is to fulfill its mission as a document of my culinary endeavors both successful and un-, I might as well face the fact that it is just as important to write about the meh as the marvelous.

I’ve made two rib recipes in the past few months.  The first were Korean-Style Short Ribs from the Gourmet cookbook.  These are a version of kalbi or galbi.  The kalbi I ate in restaurants in Korea was sliced thin, off the bone, and diners would quickly barbecue up the thin slices of meat at a small grill set right into the table and wrap it up in lettuce with a gochujang (chili pepper paste) sauce, garlic, and a couple of other condiments for a delicious garlicky treat.  I’m sure several of you (are there several of you out there reading my blog?  Ok, maybe a few of you) have had similar kalbi or bulgogi experiences at Korean restaurants here in the States.

These ribs were left on the bone, and were broiled, not grilled, after marinating in a sauce made of sesame oil, soy sauce, scallions, ginger and other stuff.  The ribs were scored, sugared for four hours, then marinated for two.

Ribs with sugar:

Ribs after broiling:

Here’s the thing.  I think that the kalbi I remembered was all about the preparation, cooking technique, and condiments; grilling vs. broiling matters, and slicing thin off the bone vs. leaving the ribs thick and meaty on the bone definitely matters.  These short ribs, broiled for a mere 15 minutes or so, were nicely caramelized but still quite fatty and fairly tough left on the bone.  The amount of fat and connective tissue that failed to be rendered by the relatively short cooking time was actually a little repellent.  And, without the lettuce, gochujang, and garlic, not to mention the real live fire in the middle of your dining table, kalbi wasn’t nearly as fun.  C-

The other ribs I made were Slow-Baked Spareribs with Mango Chutney Marinade.  These, you marinate overnight in a mixture of soy sauce, sherry, sesame oil, and mango chutney, and then bake for several hours.  You see how it says mango chutney, right there in the title of the recipe?  Perhaps I’m naive, but I thought that this indicated that mango chutney would be a predominant flavor in the dish.  I was envisioning a scenario where the chutney thickly coated the ribs and cooked up to a nice, sticky glaze-like substance that imparted a sweet yet tangy flavor to the ribs.

But that’s not what happened.  The recipe calls for a mere 1/4c of chutney, compared to 1c of sherry and 1/2c of soy sauce.  I doubled the amount of chutney and it was still just barely detectable.  That being said, they were still ribs, and they were still pretty tasty and tender after baking for a few hours at low heat, even if they did mostly taste like soy sauce and sesame oil.  I tried to up the chutney power in the dish by making a dipping sauce of rice vinegar mixed with chutney, and that was pretty good.  But still, a good barbecue rib recipe would kick these ribs’ asses any day of the week.  B-

Tamale pie

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Revisiting some old favorites this week.  I’ve made this tamale pie from The New Vegetarian Epicure about a half-dozen times now.

The New Vegetarian Epicure is my go-to vegetarian cookbook.  It’s the first vegetarian cookbook I ever owned that didn’t suck (yes, I’m looking at you, Moosewood).  The things I like about this cookbook are:

  • Recipes seem to have been carefully tested for the home cook
  • No compromise on flavor – after making a recipe from this cookbook, I never end up saying, “That wasn’t bad, considering it’s vegetarian.”
  • Cookbook is organized seasonally, and by menus.  So, an example of a chapter heading might be, “Little dinner parties for fall and winter”.  I like throwing little dinner parties!  And look, it’s fall and/or winter!  What could be better?
  • There are everyday recipes here, but there are also many recipes that are elegant and interestingly presented.  They’re not all, “Mix the bulgur and the tempeh together in a bowl.  Now throw some grated cheese on top.”

This tamale pie recipe makes a shit-ton of food.  It claims to serve 8-10 people, but Victor and I had around 4-5 servings apiece, and we also had friends over for dinner the other night, at which time we all consumed a total of six servings (including seconds for some), so that’s like 14-16 servings.  Dear future self:  Cutting this recipe by 2/3 or so might be an OK thing to do.  Love, past self.

It’s a little labor intensive but some stuff can be done ahead.  For instance, making the Ancho Chile Salsa:

This gets incorporated into a vegetable stew of squash (I used kabocha), tomatillos, carrots, potatoes, leeks, and green onions:

Which is then transferred to a casserole dish.  Or two casserole dishes, because even my very large casserole dish can’t accommodate all of it.  Then it is topped with grated cheese, but wait!  It gets better.

Now comes the dish’s raison d’etre, the masa mixture that puts the “tamale” in tamale pie.  Cream some butter (I’m continuing to use the $12.99 hand mixer for these tasks) and alternately blend in a masa harina dry ingredient mixture and some corn and milk that have been pureed in a blender, then lighten the batter with 7 egg whites beaten to stiff peaks.  I happened to have 7 egg whites on hand because those lemon bars I made required 7 egg yolks.  In fact, the whole reason I made this dish at this particular time was because I knew it would be a good way to use up 7 egg whites.

Bake ’til golden and bubbly.  I baked atop cookie sheets, since my casserole dishes were overfull and couldn’t hold all the bubbling.

This dish is hearty and homey, but at the same time full of flavors that you don’t usually encounter in your day-to-day routine.  The recipe recommends serving with a hot chipotle salsa, which I think would add to the excitement of the dish, but which I usually don’t bother with, since Victor isn’t especially fond of hot foods.  But you should totally do that, if you happen to make this.

In addition to having made this exact dish around a half-dozen times, I’ve also made a couple of variations, hanging on to the masa crust and sliding other fillings underneath it.  I think I topped a black bean stew with this stuff once, and something or other with chicken.  Almost everything is better when covered with a masa crust, so you really can’t go wrong.  A

Lemon squares

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Lemon bars are amongst my favorite desserts, but their yolk-intensive nature can cause them to tread dangerously the thin line between sublime and grotesque.  I’ve had lemon bars before that were just too weirdly eggy, and I tell you, man – they freak me out.

But a good lemon bar successfully disguises its egginess with some sort of magical sweet-tart alchemy.  And, when the filling hits the right note, all of the rest of the components – the shortbready crust and the light dusting of powdered sugar on top – just come together and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Then after that they eat your brains.  With a Coke and a smile.

For these lemon bars I used – you guessed it – the recipe from The New Best Recipe.  Whatever data Amazon.com is collecting on my shopping habits must be totally whack anymore, cause I look up that link, like, every three days.  I’m really making an effort to get away from the one cookbook and branch out a little – and soon you will actually see evidence of that in the pages of this blog.  But for now, bear with me.

The recipe involves, as you might guess, a fair amount of lemon juice and lemon zest.  Look!  Here’s that gadget again!  Citrus devil, you are now my bitch.


Flour, confectioner’s sugar, and butter are processed in a food processor for the crust, which is then baked briefly.

The lemon curd is gently stirred until it reaches 170 degrees, at which point it becomes curdified.  Or curdled.  Curdled is probably the better word to use, there.  Is it?  Curdled has such a negative connotation.  And it starts to sound foreign and lose all meaning if you say it over and over again.  Curdled.  Curdled.  Curdled.

Then you do some other stuff, and lemon bars ensue.  And profits!

The only thing I’d really change about this recipe is maybe a tad less lemon juice – the sourness was just ever so slightly dominating the sweet.  But other than that, it gets a gold star.  And an A.

Roast beef, mashed potatoes, and gravy

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Seared in a skillet to start, roasted at 275 for about an hour, then finished at 500 to brown it up some more – pretty standard technique but yielded excellent results.  Mashed potatoes – we were out of milk, so made with half and half and butter – mmm, rich.  I like ‘em with the skins still on.  And gravy- made a roux in the pan that I seared the roast in, browned the roux for a bit more flavor, then added the last of the chicken stock from the freezer and whisked till thick.  My roux:chicken stock ratio was a little high so the gravy was too thick, but other than that, all was well.

Each week, my grocery shopping routine goes a little like this:  I go to Rainbow Grocery for veggies; bulk spices, beans, and grains; milk; cheese; etc.  It’s substantially cheaper than Whole Foods for these items, but being a dirty hippie store it doesn’t have any meat.  So, I get my meat either at Whole Foods or Avedano’s.  I used to get meat boxes at Avedano’s – 25 lbs or so of meat in various pre-ordained configurations for a bit of a discount – which had the result of nicely stocking up my freezer, but we got tired of having the same few cuts of meat all the time, and receiving less-preferred items (e.g. tubs of lard) bundled with more-preferred items.  So, instead, whenever I go to Whole Foods, in addition to my meat needs for the week, I check out whatever they have on sale, and if something looks tempting I snatch it up and throw it in the freezer for later.  If nothing looks tempting or particularly cheap, my default is to pick up a whole roasting chicken for $3/lb.

The roast was one such purchase, and a week or so ago when we were towards the end of a grocery shopping cycle and had little left in the house to eat, the roast came out and got us through a few days.  And it was cheap- we got a total of three 2-person meals out of it for around $12.  Not too bad.

The carving board featured in the photos is a Christmas gift from my parents and is serious business – look at all that juice in the well.  Thanks, guys!

Yellow soup

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I made this African Curried Coconut Soup the other night.

The stats for the recipe on Epicurious say that 99% of raters would make this dish again.  I would make it again, too.  I am the 99%.

Looking at the reviews of the recipe, however, one sees that almost everyone would add their own tweaks to improve upon the dish.  Again, I stand with the majority- I felt that it had untapped potential.

The only thing I changed about the recipe this time was using chicken stock instead of veggie, since I had that on hand.  Here’s what I’d do next time:

  • Roast the tomatoes and jalapeno
  • Omit the red bell pepper – I just don’t like bell peppers in most stuff – maybe throw in some nicely browned zucchini or some other veggie that caught my fancy
  • Add a squeeze or two of lime
  • Maybe some ginger would be nice too
  • The recipe calls for curry powder.  I dunno – curry powder?  Sometimes curry powder feels like a cop-out to me.  Maybe season it with my own spice mixture

This is what Victor would do next time:

  • Add some shredded chicken

Which I think would also be good.  In the interests of keeping it a quick weeknight meal, I guess I’d stop there, but if time/inclination allowed I might also cook up a batch of chick peas in my slow cooker to have on hand to add to the soup.  Since I’ve been cooking legumes in the slow cooker fairly frequently recently, purchasing the can of chickpeas called for by the recipe kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

As a side note, I developed a strange itchy rash, similar to poison oak, in the middle of my back the morning after eating this soup.  It’s still with me, after four days.  Coincidence?  A portent?  I don’t know.  But I don’t like it.  This recipe gets a B-, for not trying hard enough, and for potential rash-inducing properties.

Next big kitchen purchase

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My next big kitchen purchase, still at least a few months away as we’ve got taxes coming up here pretty soon, will be a stand mixer.

It’ll be good to have a mixer with some oomph for cookie doughs and such, but I’m mostly interested in getting a stand mixer for kneading bread doughs.  I’ve never balked at kneading by hand in the past, but the fact that I currently have a kitchen with tile countertops means that cleanup after kneading is enough of a chore that I usually just work around the problem by not making bread.

And yes, I know I could consider cheaper options like using a large cutting board to knead on, etc.  I want a new toy.  Is that so wrong?

I’m considering between the following two models:

Kitchen-Aid Ultra Power Stand Mixer

Kitchen-Aid Artisan Stand Mixer

The main differences between the two models seem to be the following:

  • Power:  Ultra has a 300W motor, Artisan has a 325W motor
  • Attachments:  Ultra’s are metal, Artisan’s are nylon-coated
  • Capacity:  Ultra = 4.5 qt bowl, Artisan = 5 qt bowl
  • Price:  Artisan is around $30>Ultra when comparing the two cheapest colors

The Artisan comes in about 15 different colors.  The price can vary by about $70 depending upon what color you get, with Imperial Black being the cheapest and colors such as Boysenberry being the most expensive.  Which is strange to me, because which color seems more evocative of a powerful, badass mixer to you?:

Imperial black

Boysenberry

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps badassery isn’t the primary concern of the target market for these stand mixers.  How curious.  Anyway, does anyone have any stand-mixer-related words of wisdom to bestow?

Pad Thai

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Pad thai is all about contrasts, to me – sweet and sour, soft and crisp.  I’ve made The New Best Recipe version (yes, I know – I’ve been hitting that cookbook hard lately) twice now and am still messing around with it to tailor it to my particular tastes.

It’s a fairly easy weeknight recipe – prepare a sauce of tamarind paste, fish sauce, vinegar, sugar, some other stuff; soak the noodles in hot water; chop up your garlic, ginger, scallions, peanuts; brown some tofu; then bring all of the above together quickly in a hot skillet.  Shabam, done.  And theoretically, the American Test Kitchen folks have already made the dish 30 times to optimize the process for me.

But, the recipe as-is doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head.  It might have to do with the fact that I’m working with tamarind concentrate rather than the tamarind paste the recipe calls for – instructions are provided for substituting concentrate, but the fact that it is described as looking “more like a scary pomade than a foodstuff” makes me think that they’re not fully behind the tamarind concentrate alternative.

I’m not really ready to give up on the tamarind concentrate, though.  First of all, it doesn’t look that bad:

All right, in this picture I guess it kind of looks like a smaller version of that thing that killed Tasha Yar in ST:TNG.  But I never really liked her anyway.

Bye, Tasha.

Second of all, it tastes pretty good, which is what we care about, right?  Sharply sour, a little tannic.  And thirdly, for the clincher, it’s available at the coop I shop at each week.

I think what I’m grappling with is the proper amount of tamarind concentrate to use.  The first time I made the recipe, I used the suggested 1 tbsp in 2/3c water.  This didn’t really yield enough overall tamarind flavor for me.  And, the amount of sugar in the recipe wasn’t sufficient to provide a nice sweet yin to the tamarind’s sour yang.  So, the second time I made the recipe I upped the tamarind concentrate from 1 tbsp to 2 tbsp, and the sugar from 3 tbsp to 4 tbsp.  Too much, too much!  The tamarind was a bit overpowering.  So, next time I’ll be going with 1.5 tbsp of concentrate and 4 tbsp of sugar, and we’ll see how that goes.

Here’s the tossing in the hot skillet part:

And here’s the pad thai, served up, with peanuts, scallions, and cilantro on top, as well as lime wedges and some pea shoots for pretty:

It’s pretty tasty even before nailing down the ratio of tamarind:sugar, so I’ll give the recipe a B+ as is, with potential upgrading pending future modification.

Equipment

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What is this new devilry?

Silly Boromir!  Why are you so scared all the time?  It’s just a citrus juicer.

It has a reversible reamer so that you can ream both large and small citrus fruits (small size shown).

You may not understand the significance of the citrus juicer now, but I assure you that it will be important in a subsequent installment of this blog.  And that, my friends, is what they call foreshadowing.

And that, my friends, is what they call a fluff-piece.  Now 100% content-free!  Don’t miss us on Yahoo! Shine!

 

 

Thick and Chewy Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies

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As we all know, it can be risky to elevate someone’s expectations.  Hearing someone rave too fulsomely about a movie can render the actual experience disappointing, even if the movie is quite good taken without the preamble.

The confident folks at Cook’s Illustrated have no such qualms.  This is how they introduce their Thick and Chewy Double Chocolate Cookie in The New Best Recipe:

…the sort of confection that creates intense focus while it is consumed, sight and sound subordinate to taste, overshadowing the other senses to the point of dysfunction.

Those are some big claims.  But will the finished product back them up, or are they just the overheated ravings of a hyper-caffeinated copy writer?

You get a choice of what kind of cookie you want to make with this recipe.  You’ve got your Thick and Chewy Double Chocolate Cookie, and then your Thick and Chewy Triple Chocolate Chip Cookie is offered as a variant.  It’s the same as the Thick and Chewy Double Chocolate Cookie, only with the addition of chocolate chips, which allows you to add one to the number of chocolate dimensions in the cookie, like a +1 Chocolate Sword of Smiting.  In order to fully assess the sense-obliterating properties of the cookie, I opted for the Thick and Chewy Triple Chocolate Chip Cookie variant.

The recipe itself is a little more fiddly than the average cookie recipe, though not to a deal-breaking extent.  You have to make sure not to overbeat the batter, which gets pretty thick toward the end.  Also, I’m guessing that America’s Test Kitchen is not equipped with a $12.99 hand mixer, like my kitchen is- I was getting that comfortingly familiar burnt-motor smell by the end of the mixing process.  The recipe calls for allowing the batter to stand for 30 minutes at room temperature until it achieves a fudgy consistency- my batter was already fudgy and more by the time I was done mixing it, so I omitted that step.

The recipe also suggests scooping your batter with a 1 3/4″ ice cream scoop.  Yeah, I’m not falling into that trap again – I just used two spoons and that worked just fine.

I sampled a fair bit of the batter as I went along, and was soon all hopped up on chocolate and sugar and perhaps a small amount of espresso powder (the recipe calls for two teaspoons).  I was beginning to see, now, how maybe these cookies could indeed be dysfunction-inducing. There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a baker in the depths of a Thick and Chewy Triple Chocolate Chip Cookie dough binge.

The recipe strictly enjoined me to take the cookies out after ten minutes, regardless of the apparent done-ness of the cookie.  I did so, and at first was concerned that the cookies seemed too fragile.  But, they do firm up upon cooling to room temperature to a pleasing soft texture.  I used E. Guittard semi-sweet chocolate wafers and Ghiradelli unsweetened cocoa, and I do think this is the kind of recipe where you want to use reasonably high-quality chocolate.

Rich and intense, this is like a high-powered chocolate dessert in cookie format.  Not the kind of cookie you want to put in your kid’s lunchbox, unless you want her to get sent to the principal’s office after lunch for flying around the classroom on a broomstick.  Also not the kind of cookie you would want to eat for a soothing midnight snack, unless you want to use the wee small hours to do your taxes and rearrange the furniture.  Definitely the kind of cookie that will take any chocolate yen you have, give it a spanking, and send it to its room for the next, oh, several hours, anyway.  A

Bob is around 60% finished with his cookie and has already begun to go blind.

 

 

Ribeye for the straight guy. And potato cake.

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Lesson of the week:  if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

It had been a while since we had steak, and Victor was starting to feel a little bit sad about that, so I got a couple of nice ribeyes to cook up over the weekend.  My standard approach to steak has never been fancy- salt, pepper, then either a grill or a high-heat skillet.  But, as I was perusing the ol’ Gourmet cookbook and noticed a recipe for salt-fried ribeye and figured I would try it.  The recipe promised that:

the juices from the meat mix with the salt to form a delicious crusty coating

Delicious crusty coating, how can I resist your siren call?!  I broke out the cast iron skillet (well, it actually just kind of lives on the stove so no breaking out was required) and commenced sprinkling the 4 tsp of coarse salt that the recipe asked for.  Round about 2.5 tsp, I thought that the skillet was looking pretty darn salty, and I was getting scared, so I stopped.
Which was a good thing.  After the requisite number of minutes per side, the steak was not nearly as nicely caramelized as I would prefer, AND the promised crusty coating utterly failed to materialize.  Feeling a bit gypped, I nonetheless plated the steaks, along with wedges of the potato cake, which I’ll get to in a moment, and some nice green salad.  And then we tasted the steak, and it was *just* barely edible.  My beautiful, expensive, ribeyes!  So salty!

Looking at the reviews of this recipe on Epicurious (which I should have done ahead of time), it sounds like if you do this just right, it works- you get the crust, and the juiciness, and it’s not too salty.  But you have to heat the skillet to HIGH (recipe says moderately high).  With some practice, this recipe could be worth something.  But you know what?  I’m not made of freakin’ ribeyes.  Next time, I’m sticking with what works.  This recipe gets a D.

The potato cake was fun, though.  It’s got a French name but we won’t be using that.  We’ll just be saying, potato cake.  I used the grater attachment on my food processor for the very first time, even though I’ve had the thing for years.  Grater attachment, I wish I had known you when I was younger.  The best years of our lives, wasted!  Oh well, I guess we should be grateful that we can be together now.  Grate-ful.  Ha!  Get it?

Then you gotta squeeze out all the extra juice from the grated potatoes.  I used a tea towel, which I recently acquired for just this sort of thing so that I don’t get terrycloth lint in my food:

Then you fry it up in a skillet.  The cast iron skillet would have been perfect, but I needed that in order to completely ruin my ribeyes, so I just used a garden variety nonstick.

See how the middle is all dark and the edges are all light?  The cast iron would’ve totally taken care of that.  A decent stove would help too- my stove is electric, and old, and each burner has its own separate agenda, like a team of horses pulling in four different directions.  Still, it was pretty tasty.  Crispy buttery on the outside and creamy on the inside.  Basically like hashbrowns, but real purty.  The recipe called for 2.25 lbs of potatoes, which wound up being a bit too much – even in my extra large skillet the potato cake would have been too thick, so I left some out.  1.5lbs of potatoes in the cast iron skillet would probably be just about right.  This one gets a B.